Rhetoric and the Republic: Politics, Civic Discourse, and Education in Early America by Mark Longaker
Abstract
208 RHETORICA appears to have read every relevant primary and secondary text, so that the book serves as an excellent introduction to the topic. A further virtue of Swaminathan's book is that it elegantly models how rhetorical and literary analysis can be interwoven for a nuanced presentation of the complexities of social change. The puzzle about slavery is, as Swaminathan says, that "Great Britain dismantled this profitable trade, albeit unevenly and in a fraught manner, seemingly for the benefit of principle" (p. 213). It is a striking instance of effective rhetoric. Yet, it was not a case of a single text having done that considerable cultural work. Although some texts might have been more popular, and possibly more effective, than others, the abolitionists were successful because of a long series of arguments and counterarguments. They were successful because various topoi were repeated across genres, and not just in what we traditionally think of as "political" discourse. The book usefully reminds us of the breadth of rhetoric, and, hence, the potential breadth of rhetorical scholarship. Patricia Roberts-Miller University of Texas, Austin Mark Longaker, Rhetoric and the Republic: Politics, Civic Discourse, and Education in Early America. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2007. xx + 266 pp. ISBN 978-0-8173-1547-4 While in the past five years we have seen a number of books chal lenging and diversifying our understanding of rhetorical education in late nineteenth-century United States, including David Gold's Rhetoric at the Mar gins: Revising the History ofWriting Instruction in American Colleges, 1873-1947, Jessica Enoch's Refiguring Rhetorical Education: Women Teaching African Amer ican, Native American, and Chicano/a Students, 1865—1911, and Brian Fehler's Calvinist Rhetoric in Nineteenth-Century America. The Bartlet Professors of Sa cred Rhetoric ofAndover Seminary, relatively little work has examined rhetor ical education within colonial America. Indeed, Mark Garrett Longaker's Rhetoric and the Republic is likely the most important work to do so since Thomas P. Miller's The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces. Unlike works bv Gold or Enoch, the primary virtue of Longaker s research does not come from his examining underrep resented communities, nor does his work take us to different parts of the university as does Fehler s. Rather, Longaker's work is important because it asks us to fundamentally reexamine our historiography at the same time that it challenges us to think harder about some of our pedagogical practices. Revising accounts by Miller, Halloran, and Clark (Oratorical Culture in Nineteenth-Century America: Transformations in the Theory and Practice of Rhetoric), Longaker argues that "early American republicanism was a con tested political terrain" which allowed for a number of conflicting peda Reviews 209 gogical ideals and practices to emerge in its name (p. xviii). This historical narrative in turn allows Longaker to demonstrate the anemia of the republi can revival which has been championed by both contemporary American academics and politicians alike. Since at least the 1950s, scholars represent ing various disciplines have called for a revival of civic republican political discourses as a counterweight to the hegemony of liberal political discourse. Indeed, in the United States, civic republicanism represented something of an academic third way between Soviet-inspired communist totalitarianism and American-inspired liberal capitalism. Whereas liberalism promoted negative liberty, legal proceduralism, and the interest of autonomous individuals, re publicanism promoted positive liberty, substantive values, and civic virtue. Finding a way of reviving civic republicanism would help revive active citi zenship, or so we believed. But the truth of the matter has always been that the sharp division between republicanism and liberalism was itself a prod uct of the Cold War, and one that was unsustainable when examining the eighteen and nineteenth centuries, a point Longaker brings home especially well in his analvsis of John Witherspoon. Oddly enough, Longaker never makes that argument explicitly and in stead spends most of his book demonstrating, through the use of Gramscian articulation theory, the various ways early American republican theory lent itself to very different political and economic discourses. So much the better for us, the real value of the book as far as this reader is...
- Journal
- Rhetorica
- Published
- 2011-03-01
- DOI
- 10.1353/rht.2011.0025
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