From Premise to Conclusion: Some Comments on Professional History and the Incubus of Rhetorical Historiography

From Premise to Conclusion: Some Comments on Professional History and the Incubus of Rhetorical Historiography The association of modern professional historiography with a rhetoricd legacy may seem disconcerting, or even subversive. This is partly because rhetoric has now a diminished respectability and partly because of the remarkable success amongst historians of the specific rhetorical cldm that historical writing is a matter of recapturing the past as it redly was, free of ornamentation or those larger figures of expression associated with politicd propaganda and moral enthusiasm. Thus for many historians, rhetorical historiography itself has been relegated to the status of a skeleton rattling wordily in a cupboard. Although history as a discipline may be seen as having arisen under the auspices of rhetoric this is rarely stressed in the synoptic lineages historians give of their current activity.1 With the exception of Thucydides, w h o is usuaUy thought to have been pretty good at capturing the past as it redly was, most consciously rhetoricd historians are looked upon askance, castigated, or rummaged through to see what random facts they might have gotright.The greatest school of such historians, the so-cdled 'humanist' historians of the Rendssance have suffered remarkable neglect; more applauded than read even in their own day, according to Geoffrey Elton, w e are rarely encouraged to pay them much attention now, let alone emulate their practice; as w e might be encouraged to emulate M o m m s e n , Ranke, or Maitland.2 Machiavelli and Guicciardini seem the great exceptions here but, in a sense, even they prove the rde; Guicciardini because in many ways he does not fit the picture of the rhetorical historian; Machiavelli because he is not normdly studied as an historian. W h e n he is so considered, he is found wanting, like others of his ilk; at best an erratic guide to the past as it redly was, too frequently led astray by his own passionate mord and politicd commitments. In this paper I wish, dbeit unsystematicdly, to reconsider the importance of rhetoricd historiography, especidly in its Renaissance manifestation, in order to suggest that the problems it rdsed and was known to rdse by those who practiced and theorized about such historiography are by no means peripheral to understanding some of the central problems of m o d e m professional historiography. M y suggestion is that the rhetoricd inheritance provides a vduable way of focussing upon and reveding thetensilecharacter of modem professiond historiographicd practice and therationalisationsit has generated. 2 For example, Geoffrey Elton, The Practice of History, Sydney, 1972, 12-13. 2 The Practice of History, 13. 6 C. Condren Embarrassing forebears may help explain our genetic make-up as more respectable God-parents should not. I shdl conclude with reference Geoffrey Elton's principal reflections on history, as these are so representative of much m o d e m practice and encapsulate the sort of theoretical problem to which I want to draw attention. Rhetoric I take to carry two principd senses. First and most generaUy, it can be taken as the persuasive dimension of language per se, that is as discourse considered in its relationship between speaker (writer) and an audience to be effected in some measure by speech or writing.^ Secondly, specificdly and more famously, rhetoric may be seen as the art, techne or skill of persuasion, comprising an autonomous set of rules and procedures of discourse with criteria of judgement of its own. It is on the second of these two senses that I shdl concentrate, although some of what I shall suggest has direct relevance to rhetoric in thefirstsense. The notions of rhetoric as mere ornamentation or as bombast are beside the point in the context of this essay. The paradigmatic forum for rhetoric in either of its principd senses was, as has been noted since Aristode, the world of contingent and probable judgement, the world in which beliefs could easily be swayed, actions be various and the consequences of action were always partidly uncertain. It was the world of the useful, desirable and possible, that of the assembly and the law court.4 Since Aristotle, if not before, rhetoric seen largely as...