ABSTRACT Ever since Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was published in 1962, philosophical “pluralism,” a concept barely a hundred years old, has emerged across all the academic disciplines in many different forms as a possible response to variants of skepticism, relativism, and dogmatism. What makes Richard McKeon’s meta-philosophical pluralism distinct from all others is both his focus on philosophical first principles and his rhetorical method of coordinating their possibilities for theoretical development and practical application. Yet McKeon’s lifelong intellectual project remains largely unknown even among philosophers and rhetoricians, a situation the present essay modestly hopes to ameliorate.

For the Sake of Argument: Practical Reasoning, Character, and the Ethics of Belief by Eugene Garver. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. 272 + xi pp. Being Made Strange: Rhetoric Beyond Representation by Bradford Vivian. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. 229 + xiv pp. Deliberate Conflict: Argument, Political Theory, and Composition Classes by Patricia Roberts‐Miller. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004. 263 + x pp. Liberating Voices: Writing at the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers by Karyn L. Hollis. Southern Illinois University Press, 2004. 192 + xiii pp.

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I would like to begin concretely, and the measure of my success in this paper will be the reader's assent to the rhetorical need for me to work in just some such manner as I've chosen. Consider how, at first glance (and for some time thereafter), Wayne Booth impresses one not so much as a single Booth than as a complex field of Booths: teacher, dean, member of university and national seminars-colloquiacommittees uncountable, MLA President, visiting lecturer, author of works on fiction, criticism, film, education, irony, rhetoric, ethics, religion, teaching . .1 In a recent address Booth calls himself a rhetorician, and in his most recent book a generalist (a closer look reveals to the initiate that for Booth these mean the same thing), but a set of questions will have occurred to the thoughtful Booth reader long before: is there a center to this widening (or at least fluctuating) gyre, is there some doctrine, activity, character, that pulls these pursuits together? Is calling oneself a generalist only an unsuccessful dodge of the more obviously demeaning label dilettante (however brilliant this dilettantism may be)? Or is there a unified field theory to account for these many Wayne Booths? Such a unified center does exist, I believe, though my aim in this paper is certainly not hagiographical. No, I am interested in arguing that Booth's version of rhetorical generalism is relevant to understanding-Booth, to be sure; in my view the essential Booth-but more importantly to understanding the very enterprise of rhetoric itself, as a dynamic, changing basis for liberal education-an education precisely to a specific, coherent, intellectual and moral character.2 Booth has never been content with whatever ethical order or identity he may have managed for himself (as real life author or act-er) over forty-odd years of multiform activity. Explicitly in most of his writings, more or less implicitly in the rest, Booth has not only written about rhetorical