While finding material to admire in The Rhetoric of Plato’s Republic, I present a trio of significant presuppositions within Professor Kastely’s text in order to show that they are wrong, or, at least, questionable. It’s difficult to imagine a reader of his book who could deny the author’s profound concern for justice, for example. However, the misguided, well-intentioned can, at times, be a greater danger than obvious opponents bent on our demise. It will become clear that Kastely and I work in the same state, but do not live in the same political neighborhood.What interests Kastely from the opening pages of his text is “the philosophical importance of rhetoric” (ix). Now, this runs smack into extensive evidence in Håkan Tell’s Plato’s Counterfeit Sophists. Tell’s homework reveals that the distinction between philosophers and Sophists did not exist in fifth-century texts. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle worked overtime to establish distinctions, to set boundaries, and to insist on a hierarchy of disciplines that persists with Kastely’s help.It’s an ugly story we get from Tell. The philosophers were here first—according to the philosophers. The lie about chronology is compounded by a charge that the Sophists are interlopers in Athens, interested in filthy lucre instead of the truth. The Athenian philosophers decide to stain the Sophists, for example, through defamatory stories that the foreigners “hunt” the young men of Athens, and, like prostitutes, charge money for interactions with the young men. The self-proclaimed philosophers’ counteroffer to the young, aristocratic men is a life that might be less than human. Gerald Bruns describes the philosophical life meant to function as a model for disciples of Athenian philosophy, what one can expect by renouncing sophistry: “Socrates, barefoot in the snow, standing for hours in meditation without the slightest bother, drinking the night through without getting drunk, spending the night in bed with the most beautiful man in Athens without getting an erection” (Bruns 14).The launching pad for Kastely’s text requires an acceptance of a several preconditions, such as that Socrates and Plato endorse dialogue and dialectic. My counterproposal, following Kojin Karatani, is that Plato’s dialogues, while looking for world-like conversations, are monologic (Karatani, 69). Many rhetoricians know that the dialogues turn out to be long stretches of Socrates speaking followed by an interlocutor’s response of panu ge, or something similar, phrases that are usually read as ongoing agreement, reluctant or otherwise.Kastely issues contradictory statements on the topic. At one point, Socrates exhibits “gentleness” (81, 113, 114), but in other contexts is said to shame interlocutors. At other points, Kastely offers evidence that Plato/Socrates hold audiences in contempt through various depictions that refer to the public as children, sheep, or worse (see Republic 488b, 590e–591a, 598c, and Kastely 42, 117, 180, and 189).Nancy Worman asserts: “The language that characterizes Socrates and his opponents shares more with the kind of parodic, insulting usage found in mimes, Attic comedy, and oratorical invective than it does with historical prose writing that depicts public speakers” (Worman 154). Platonic exchanges tend to denigrate and reconfigure interlocutors who do not accept the rules of the game set out by the philosophers (Karatani, 70).The philosopher Hans Blumenberg contends that the philosophical insult extends over the Republic: “The viewers of the ideal [thinking here of the figure who leaves the cave and then returns as representative of philosophy], the owners of the actual, have constantly found it easier to deride others who wanted to see with their own eyes than to show them what they could gain if they ceased to want only what is available physically” (Blumenberg 20).We have no shortage of scholars who want to read the Republic straight, adding in, where hermeneutical problems crop up, excuses about “Socratic irony.” Anyone working with Platonic texts ought to be aware of evidence pointing toward a deliberate Platonic agenda of esotericism described in the Seventh Letter. Plato: “We did not use such plain language as this—it was not safe to do so—but we succeeded by veiled allusions in maintaining the thesis that every man who would preserve himself and the people he rules must follow this course, and that any other will lead to utter destruction” (332d). In the same letter, Plato more than suggests a hermeneutical method that anticipates esotericism whenever a reader encounters a text by someone “serious,” and Plato fashioned himself “serious” (see 344 c & d in the letter).Arthur Melzer confirms Plato’s esoteric elitism (Melzer 21), using 341e as the proof text. I do not propose that Kastely has missed the boat on Plato’s esotericism, though some evidence points that way, such as the comment that Plato does not have a “fixed position he is trying to disguise” (35), or a line about those who “whisper in the ear of power” (17). Kastely then constricts options to an either/or: “This leads to a stark choice: either philosophy reconciles itself to being an esoteric form of discourse, persuasive only to a very limited number of practitioners and hence irrelevant to political life, or it discovers a way to speak to the multitude who are not philosophers.” Plato did not intend to make philosophy’s code “open source.” Kastely writes, “The philosopher becomes politically active in response to human need. If this seems like a convoluted understanding of philosophy, it is helpful to remember that it is an account of philosophy intended to explain to a non-philosophic audience the peculiar and privileged authority that should be granted to philosophy to rule” (155).Kastely: “The allegory of the cave establishes the legitimacy of philosophic rule—it is the tale of a humble and reluctant king who is moved by a sense of social responsibility to assume a burden of leadership for the benefit of a people” (141). Kastely feels that he cannot have his rhetoric without marrying rhetoric to philosophy, naming philosophy master of the household and asking rhetoric to sign a prenuptial agreement. “There’s a need for an unequal distribution of power in the city” (91), Kastely asserts. Kastely’s “heroes” are philosophers, in part because “philosophy, as Plato imagined it, is an arduous pursuit that requires a rare combination of intellectual ability and tremendous stamina of which few are capable” (xv). From Kastely’s perspective, you and I are here to obey the practitioners of esotericism. We are the “they” of this sentence: “They need to obey rulers, even if they do not fully understand them” (133).Thus, I conclude with a question that discloses my political neighborhood, one illegal in the United States since 1954. The question comes from Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks (15.4): “It must be stressed that it is precisely the first elements, the most elementary things, that are the first to be forgotten…. In the development of leaders, one premise is fundamental: is it the intention that there always be rulers and ruled, or is the objective to create the conditions in which the necessity of the existence of this division disappears?”

104 RHETORICA Some key concepts would perhaps have benefited from explicit, technical explanation. For example, the use of "hegemony" in Morris's book is disconnected from Antonio Gramsci's use of the same term. Another instance is "culture", which resonates with Lionel Trilling's meanings for this term, but, at times, seems like a synonym for ideology. In addition to references to "collective memory", Morris distinguishes "cultural memory" from "public memory", by remarking, "whereas cultural memory reflects the particularized world view and ethos of the members of a particular culture, public memory is perhaps best conceived as an amalgam of the current hegemonic bloc's cultural memory and bits and pieces of cultural memory that members of other cultures are able to preserve and protect" (p. 26). Sinners, Lovers and Heroes will be useful to scholars interested in the rhetoric, public argument, public memory, American studies, and, especially, the legacy of Abraham Lincoln's public image. LESTER C. OLSON University of Pittsburgh Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde, eds., Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Our Time: A Reader (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997) xxiii + 406 pp. Like the recent Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition by Kathy Eden, Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Our Time marks another attempt at a rhetorical Anschluss, annexing rhetoric . to hermeneutics in an apparent attempt to make rhetoric look more philosophical, for instance, by pointing to Hans-Georg Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics. In fact, two of Gadamer's own essays on rhetoric appear in the Jost and Hyde collection. While the writers within the collection draw many analogies between rhetoric and hermeneutics, hardly anyone obtains any definitional precision about the pairing. Reviews 105 On the other hand, the Jost and Hyde volume seeks to be what Eden's book avoids—concerned with the present, as conveyed by the prepositional phrase in the title, "in our time", and explicitly with politics: "Our very being-in-the-world is inseparably hermeneutical and rhetorical in complex ways and...a multi-faceted speaking as well as listening constitutes our situation. Our own time is an epoch of corporate capitalism and technologism, of vulgarization and breakdown. But it is also a time of deep reflection on linguistic interpretation: on persuasion, 'conversion' across paradigms or worldviews, propaganda, and more invidious forms of deception and power, as well as on forms of the electronic word and the new multimedia. It is, accordingly, a time in which we need both to listen to and to discuss what Gadamer calls the 'deep inner convergence' between rhetoric and hermeneutics" (p. xvi). First, "our" turns out to be some amorphous, underdetermined "everyone", and despite the implicit "critique" of "corporate capitalism" in the passage above, Jost and Hyde never get near the topic again, except to get away from it. The slide happens but a page later: "The task at hand now includes identifying hermeneutics (in its modern forms) as a further counterpart to rhetoric and rhetoric to hermeneutics and seeing both as features or dimensions of all thought and language, not only as the special methods or abilities of political praxis" (p. xvii). Before dealing with any concrete issues of political praxis, they widen the aperture of their project to "all thought and language", and thus sidestep the part of the "all" that might have brought them in contact with any logical definition of "politics", or with concrete historical events in North American party politics, for instance. The rhetoric that goes on in the streets, the deception—what the Greeks called the pseudos—the advertising, the propaganda, the double-talk, the exercises of political esotericism, the kind of interpretive practice that produces The Bible Code, all the "ugly" manifestations of rhetoric that are its life blood, hold almost no interest in the context of the book under review. (For the importance, even primacy, of the "ugly", see Slavo Zizek, in Slavo Zizek / F. W. J. von Schelling, The Abyss of Freedom / Ages of the World [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997] pp. 21-25). Jost and Hyde promote the lemony fresh side of rhetoric, the side most often seen in contemporary RHETORICA 106 accounts of what rhetoric accomplishes or can accomplish: "Rhetoric...helps promote civic engagement and...

Comparative Rhetoric by George A. Kennedy. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press (1998): ix + 238 pp. Rhetoric Reclaimed: Aristotle and the Liberal Arts Tradition by Janet M. Atwill. Cornell UP, 1998. xvi; 235 pp. Landmark Essays on Aristotelian Rhetoric edited by Richard Leo Enos and Lois Peters Agnew. New Jersey: Hermagoras Press of Lawrence Erlbaum, 1998.265 pp. Rhetoric and the Arts of Design by David S. Kaufer and Brian S. Butler. Mahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1996.322 pp. The Rhetoric Canon edited by Brenda Deen Schildgen. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1997.251 pp.

Rhetoric and Human Consciousness: A History by Craig R. Smith. Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland, 1998; 456 pp. The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces by Thomas P. Miller. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997. 344 pp. Composition‐Rhetoric by Robert J. Connors. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997. 374 pp. Political Style: The Artistry of Power by Robert Hariman. University of Chicago Press (1995): xii+259 pp. Rhetoric in an Antifoundational World: Language, Culture, and Pedagogy, ed. Michael Bernard‐Donals and Richard R. Glejzer. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. 468 pp.