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  • The Politics of Eloquence: David Hume’s Polite Rhetoric by Marc Hanvelt
  • Neil Mcarthur (bio)
Marc Hanvelt. The Politics of Eloquence: David Hume’s Polite Rhetoric. University of Toronto Press. x, 218. $50.00

David Hume wrote beautiful English prose, and language was something he took seriously. If we compare different editions of his works, we can see that he obsessed endlessly about points of style, correcting and recorrecting the texts over the course of decades. He was literally revising proofs on his deathbed. He was also one of the great analysts of human emotion, and he was acutely aware of the way in which language can be used to excite people’s passions. “Nothing is more capable,” he says, “of infusing any passion into the mind, than eloquence.” Yet Hume scholars, mostly trained as philosophers rather than as literary critics, have tended to focus on the logic of his arguments rather than their means of expression, and have shown little interest in the issue of rhetoric. In his interesting new book, Marc Hanvelt sets out to address this gap in the literature.

Hanvelt is a political theorist, and his interest is, as his title indicates, in the political implications of rhetoric. Hume saw that, in the hands of religious and political demagogues, rhetoric is a dangerous weapon. Most people would agree. According to what Hanvelt calls “the dominant paradigm in contemporary liberal and democratic theory,” the solution, following Kant, is to assert the primacy of reason and to insist on impartiality in political debate. Hume, by contrast, thinks we must develop a new kind of rhetoric, one that is polite and refined, after the model of Demosthenes and Joseph Addison. Such a rhetoric can help produce the sort of moderate politics on which Hume thinks a civilized society depends. Hanvelt suggests that Hume can help us reconceptualize political debate in our own time. With his help, we can, Hanvelt hopes, develop a more nuanced conception of “public reason,” one that pays due deference to the emotions that motivate us without allowing politics to become simply a forum for demagoguery.

Hanvelt’s study is clearly argued and (as befits its topic) elegantly written. The book’s central thesis is persuasive. Hume engaged in a lifelong battle against the forces of political and religious extremism, and he worked hard to construct an alternative political discourse that would appeal to people’s moderate and pacific sentiments. Rhetoric had a central [End Page 508] role to play in this project, and we should be grateful to Hanvelt for helping to elucidate what that role was.

Hanvelt has not given us a study of Hume’s own rhetorical techniques. And while he connects Hume’s ideas about rhetoric to those of other English and Scottish writers of the period, he does not take us further back into the European rhetorical tradition. There is no reference, for instance, to Quentin Skinner’s work on Hobbes and rhetoric, which takes us deep inside the humanist curriculum of the Renaissance and early modern period. We thus must look elsewhere to get a full sense of how rhetoric was conceptualized and debated by intellectuals of the time. We also learn nothing about the specifics of Hume’s education and his early environment. When in school, was the young Hume instructed specifically in rhetorical techniques, or did this come indirectly through the study of classical texts? And what would he have heard in church? The best Calvinist preachers, like all great religious speakers, were masters of rhetoric. Yet Calvinism also brings with it strong suspicions about the power of emotion. There is thus still interesting work to be done on the topic of Hume and rhetoric.

Hanvelt is generous in acknowledging the work of other scholars. He cites them almost exclusively to support his own conclusions rather than to challenge theirs. There is no widely accepted interpretation of Hume that comes under attack here. Perhaps, given his topic, his generous and polite tone should come as no surprise. Hanvelt’s book deepens and nuances our understanding of Hume rather than upending it. But this is no criticism. The work constitutes a valuable addition to the corpus of...

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