Abstract

Reviews 211 caught on principally because a privileged class of moderate gentlemen enjoying the spoils of the Scotch commercial economy desired entrance into and the ability to participate in British high society" (p. 106). Really? When did early capitalists get so dense? Was there no other advantage to belletrism, perhaps something related to the concrete economic situation of the Scots or the Americans? Apparently not. Needless to say, if there is a moment when Longaker s history gets reductive, it is in his handling of this movement which other scholars, such as Lois Agnew and Arthur Walzer, have shown to be far more dynamic While it is true that much of this work was published subsequent to Longaker's book, I, for one, found myself frustrated with the often dismissive tone Longaker took with Scottish thinkers, especially Blair and Karnes who were often described as "genteel" as if that were some affront. It is worth pointing out that the term "genteel" did not acquire its present day negative connotations in the United States until late in the nineteenth century. Then again, perhaps that label was part of a deliberate rhetorical strategy by Longaker to chastize scholars invested in the present day republican revival and Longaker certainly has a point there. These questions aside, Longaker's work suggests a number of important ways research in the field can and should be pursued. The republican theory Longaker examines was a cosmopolitan phenomenon that not only manifested itself in multiple forms within the United States but throughout much of Europe. 1, for one, hunger to see comparative work on republican pedagogy within the United States and other countries, like France, who were swept up in eighteenth-century republican thought. Paul Dahlgren Georgia Southwestern State University Bryan Garsten, Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2006. 276 pp. ISBN 0-674-02168-1 Selected by the National Endowment for the Humanities to give the 1992 Jefferson Lecture, Bernard Knox was interviewed by NEH's Chairman, Lynne Cheney. Cheney expressed dismay at Knox's praise of the sophists: the sophists were the bad guys; they made the weaker case appear the stronger; they were relativists and skeptics. Only someone who believes in absolute truth, like Plato, can make the world safe for democracy (Humanities 13 (1992): 4-9, 31-36). Bryan Garsten's Saving Persuasion could have helped Cheney tell a more defensible, and indeed interesting and important story, but without the moral she wanted to draw. Garsten makes the case for a politics of persuasion by examining the intellectual roots of the modern suspicion of persuasive rhetoric and then challenging them, pointing the way toward an understanding of deliberation in which rhetoric plays a central role (p. 4). 212 RHETORICA In the first half of the book, Garsten examines three anti-rhetorical thinkers who contributed to the social contract tradition and thus to modern liberalism. Hobbes, Rousseau, and Kant all saw rhetoric as the enemy of both personal autonomy and political freedom. While their attacks on the rhetoric of religious enthusiasm, the rhetoric of factions, and the rhetoric of egotistic subversion make possible modern republicanism and democracy, their success had a price. Therefore the second half of the book turns to Aristotle and Cicero for understandings of rhetoric that do not reduce to the sophistic that so exercised Cheney. This is not a defense of the ancients against the moderns. Garsten instead aims at formulating a distinctively modern idea of rhetoric and deliberation that responds to the challenges of Hobbes, Rousseau, and Kant. In the Rhetoric Aristotle rejected the idea that the sophist had a unique and powerful faculty. In modern considerations of persuasion, the worry is that conscience or revelation gives a unique and powerful source and content of judgment. As Garsten notes, Cicero argues that rhetoric brought people out of the state of nature into a civil state, while Hobbes sees powerful orators doing the opposite, making people more unsociable (p. 35). Why were these early modern thinkers so opposed to rhetoric? First, they saw the damage caused by rhetorically powerful religious enthusiasts, but their aversion goes deeper. "Liberalism's aversion to persuasion is...