Abstract

312 RHETORICA relato del libanés. Lafabula docet podrá obtenerla mi lector sin necesidad de mucho batallar mental. José Calvo González Malaga Lois Peters Agnew, Outward, Visible Propriety: Stoic Philosophy and Eighteenth-Century British Rhetorics (Columbia, SC, University of South Carolina Press, 2008. 211 pp. The thesis of Lois Peters Agnew's Outward, Visible Propriety: Stoic Philos­ ophy and Eighteenth-Century British Rhetorics is a bold one: "This book argues that the history of British rhetoric cannot be understood without attending to Stoic strains in influential language theories of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries" (p. 1). Since Stoicism hardly appears in scholarly works on eighteenth-century British rhetoric, we must conclude that these histories are wanting. The narrative that Agnew in part contests has two parts and is as follows: First, the empirical epistemologies of Locke, Hume, Hartley, and Reid offered a new account of cognition and emotional response that had implications for rhetorical theory. Campbell and Priestly, recognizing the importance of these ideas, incorporated them into their theories. In their new epistemologicalpsychological accounts, rhetoric moved away from in its civic function as the means for reaching decisions in social, political settings and toward an inter­ est in the way an individual formed ideas, became emotionally engaged, and then acted. Rhetorical theory became concerned with providing a description of the way an individual processes sense impressions at the expense of the Classical concern with public deliberation. Second, the rhetorics of Smith, Karnes and Blair replaced an emphasis on helping students create speeches with developing students' receptive capacities—with developing students' taste—and establishing standards of judgment for all the types of discourse that constitute belles lettres. Taking these changes together, some scholars have depicted eighteenth-century rhetoric as abandoning rhetoric's tradi­ tional political mission and transforming rhetoric into a technical, psycho­ logical, and instrumental science in the service of bourgeois individualism and self-improvement. Agnew does not contest specifically that the overtly political is no longer thematized in eighteenth century rhetoric; nor does she deny that eighteenth century rhetoric is different. She does deny, however, that a social mission vanishes in the theories she analyzes. She insists that eighteenth-century rhetorical theorists were themselves anxious about movements tow ard indi­ vidualism, secularism, and scientism and developed their theories of rhetoric not to accommodate these movements but to ameliorate their effects. Her ar­ gument is that the concepts central to eighteenth-centurv rhetoric-—common Reviews 313 sense, taste, and propriety—constitute a technical vocabulary that, if cor­ rectly read in the context of Stoic concepts familiar to the eighteenth-century theorists, are the basis for a social theory of rhetoric. Agnew's "Introduction" and first chapter, "Stoic Ethics and Rhetoric," offer a short summary of Stoicism that attempts to complicate some of the stereotypes that readers may hold of it. While Agnew acknowledges that Stoicism has a long, complex history, she is not much concerned with nu­ ance or the ensuing historical complications. Rather, she mines the tradition for Stoic themes that serve her purposes—a somewhat circular way of pro­ ceeding but forgivable since the eighteenth-century rhetorical theorists who are her concern would themselves be interested in Stoicism as appropriators . She is interested in dispelling or complicating stereotypes of the Stoic wise man who stands above the social norms, proudly beyond influence by others, and practices at best a disciplined sympathy, cultivating an austere self-command that hardly seems social. And of course the Stoics had notori­ ously little use for rhetoric. But as Agnew points out, the wise man has a civic obligation, and she highlights themes of civic duty and responsibility, in Roman Stoicism especially. With regard to rhetoric, Cicero, who faulted the Stoic attitude toward rhetoric while advocating Stoicism, judged the impoverished Stoic theory of language and rhetoric a remediable deficiency. In Chapter 2, Agnew traces the concept of commonsense in Shaftesbury, Hutchenson, and Reid to Stoic antecedents. The three eighteenth-century theorists had, among themselves, distinctly different understandings of the meaning of commonsense, which Agnew acknowledges while maintaining that their different articulations are similarly motivated to find in human innate cognitive and moral capacities an argument against skepticism and the basis for...