Reviews 215 Cicero, the priority of deliberative over judicial rhetoric, the particularity of practical judgment, and its ultimately controversial nature, usefully question contemporary theorists of deliberative democracy. The trouble with "public reason, as commonly understood, is that it aims at the unanimity of all reasonable persons. If one disagrees with the verdicts of public reason, then one convicts oneself of being unreasonable, which is not usually a welcome conclusion. In sum, this is an unusually ambitious and helpful book. I would want to rewrite slightly Garsten's judgments of Hobbes, Rousseau, and Kant. To me, their rhetoric against rhetoric served useful progressive purposes, allowing people with a diversity of opinions to live together in circumstances that seemed to suggest that only unanimity, imposed or not, could save us from religious wars brought about by the rhetoric of certainty. Each found a way of combating the rhetoric of certainty without replacing it by skepticism. Looking back, they only succeeded in their task by severely limiting the workings of practical judgment. Aristotle and Cicero were both well aware of the dangers of civil war, yet thought we could avoid them from deliberating together, not through circumscribing the power of individual practical judgment. Neither the anti-rhetorical liberals nor the Greek and Roman rhetorical theorists Garsten discusses provide much comfort to those, like Cheney, who think that Platonic allegiance to an absolute truth is the condition for freedom and democracv. Hobbes, Rousseau, and Kant saw a rhetoric of certainty as the enemy of freedom, and Aristotle and Cicero constructed forms of rhetoric that separated themselves from sophistic without the need for support from belief in absolute truths. Garsten usefully makes history more complicated, and more practical. Eugene Garver Saint John's University Bjorn Hambsch, .. ganz andre Beredsamkeit': Transformationen antiker und moderner Rhetorik bei Johann Gottfried Herder (PJaetorikForschungen 17). Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2007,280 pp. ISBN 3484680172 What changed in the eighteenth century? What made literature around 1700 different from writing a century later? How was literature theorized at the beginning, and how was it theorized at the end of the century? These are questions literary historians have been asking for a long time. In the literary historiography of the German-speaking countries, they have traditionally been entwined with further questions about the development of a distinctively German literature and the postulate of a breakthrough to an authentically German literary culture. 216 RHETORICA The nationalist answer to these questions was that in the course of the century the chilly foreign classicism of the preceding era was overthrown by ethnocentric proto-romanticism, and its arid rationalism by a literature of feeling and sensibility And Germany—the Germany of the Sturm und Drang—was in the vanguard. Its self-liberation from neo-classicism and rationalism propelled its literature to the forefront of European culture, leaving other nations trailing in its wake. This heroic story was elaborated in German literary histories of the later nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries. A key element in the story was the claim that the eighteenth century saw the demise of rhetoric as a system of thought governing both literary production and the criticism of literature. Rhetoric, a system of rules derived from antiquity and codified in the European revival of learning, was the vehicle through which a Latinizing and classicizing culture exerted its normalizing hegemony over the native genius of the modern age. The German champion who overthrew rhetoric and liberated his own nation's culture from its tyranny was Herder. He was the founding father of modern German literature, who by liquidating the inhibiting legacy of rhetoric unburdened a whole new generation of writers and thus made possible the literary flowering of the final third of the century. The old progressive story has proved remarkably tenacious, even if its more strident nationalist elements have naturally been censored out since 1945. Much has been done to challenge and correct it. But given Herder's crucial position in the story, it is clear that no revision would be complete until his relation to rhetoric was thoroughly re-examined. It is this much-needed task that Bjorn Hambsch has set himself in his new book. He has done an...