Making the Case: Advocacy and Judgment in Public Argument ed. by Kathryn M. Olson, et al. (review)

In May 2009, Northwestern University hosted a conference honoring David Zarefsky on his retirement. Making the Case: Advocacy and Judgment in Public Argument is one result. This collection of essays, however, centers neither around Zarefsky nor around his work, but rather honors him, as the editors suggest, through “reconstructing, evaluating, and explaining the larger importance of a public argument in a specific historical case,” and through “critically examin[ing] and evaluat[ing] a situated instance in which a rhetor used argument in an attempt to build a case in the public sphere for phronesis” (x). These elements unite the book across a wide array of subjects ranging from Homer to Lincoln to Greenspan. Scholars of particular subjects will be interested in individual contributions, but readers of the whole volume will experience a Burkean “casuistic stretching” of our rhetorical past, its innovative moments, argumentative alternatives, interpretive implications, and contemporary influences.

In the introductory essay entitled as if it were a conclusion, “Reflections on Making the Case,” David Zarefsky himself makes the case for “making the case.” In the most conceptual essay of the book, he argues for a tripartite framework with which to think about what is done when arguing about public arguments. First, argumentation scholarship involves discourse analysis through which a scholar speaks for the text: explaining it, interpreting it, evaluating it, and advocating for it. Next, these case studies develop understandings of texts’ situatedness and relate a “text to something beyond itself” (10). Finally, such arguments about advocacy engage in “historical inquiry” about rhetorical events historically and historical forces with a rhetorical perspective. Each author, to varying degrees of emphasis, makes a case in these three ways.

With the only essay not presented at the conference, G. Thomas Good-night examines Homer’s Odyssey. Instead of attending to Odysseus’s journey, Goodnight focuses on his son’s speeches in the oft overlooked and even dismissed Telemachy, preceding the adventure. According to Goodnight, Homer brings into written discourse an oratorical consciousness, one that makes private concerns public, stimulates debate through controversy, and advocates strategically to the moment.

The next three contributions transport readers to mid-nineteenth century America and continue the examination of texts that are underappreciated alternatives. In his essay, James Jasinski assesses Lysander Spooner’s radical constitutionalism as an alternative reading of the U.S. Constitution. Making the case about a text (Spooner’s 1845 For the Sake of Argument) that made the case about another text (the Constitution), Jasinski’s close analysis demonstrates how Spooner created a space for new argumentation about slavery by providing innovative ways for thinking about slavery’s unconstitutionality, thereby generating a novel mode of civic association, all while maintaining fidelity to both the country’s founding document and racial justice. In the next essay, Michael Leff turns his attention to Lincoln’s controversial 1842 Temperance Address. Arguing as much about the speech as with the interpretations about it, Leff recognizes other readers’ frustration and puzzlement about Lincoln’s contradiction of imploring “kind persuasion” toward the intemperate while vehemently denouncing temperance activists who condemn through moral suasion and legislating coercive prohibition. Lincoln, Leff argues, “forces himself into rhetorical dilemmas he cannot surmount” (91). Could anyone? Yet, Leff commends Lincoln for facing long-standing dilemmas between goodwill (eunoia) and virtue (arête) in achieving the good. With the political present as a backdrop to her inquiry, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell brings attention to the discourse of much-maligned President Andrew Johnson. Treating him as anything but a failure, Campbell analyzes how Johnson’s states’ rights unionist rhetoric led him to the vice presidency but then put him at odds with Congress after the Civil War in an ideological struggle over the extent to which the principles in the Declaration of Independence informed the Constitution. Pointing out the similarity of Johnson’s ideas to contemporary conservative views...