Adam Smith: The Rhetoric of Propriety

3. Rhetorical Propriety in Eighteenth-Century Theories of Discourse

C H A PT E R 3 Rhetorical Propriety in EighteenthCenturyTheories of Discourse W hile Smith’s theory of propriety in rhetoric and ethics was undoubtedly influenced by his encounter with classical propriety , his thinking also clearly drew on and responded to a vigorous attention to propriety and related concepts by scholars and writers in his own time.The strands of interest in rhetorical propriety in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain that influenced Smith flowed from a larger set of concerns dominating intellectual discourse, including a commitment to inductivism in science, complementary developments in epistemology, and, partly in response to developments in these areas, a new interest in criticism and aesthetics.Each of these merits some attention before we turn to Smith. Propriety in Scientific and Philosophical Discourse Francis Bacon’s reorganization of human knowledge in The Advancement of Learning (1605) tasked rhetoric or “illustration” with transmitting the discoveries of science (3:409), signaling an elevation of res over verba.“The first distemper of learning is when men study words and not matter” (3:284). Consequently, rhetorical propriety for Bacon was largely a matter of coordinating words with the matter of which they are “but the images.” If this indicates a new scientific emphasis on visual observation,it also suggests that rhetorical propriety, with its historical connection to sight and appearance, would have a role to play. Indeed, for Bacon, the new subject matter allows some stylistic latitude in the coordination of words and things: the widely accepted view of Bacon’s attitude toward style is that he saw it as functional —that is, as determined by appropriateness to subject matter, audience , aim, and (to a lesser extent) speaker.1 But Bacon was a propagandist for science,not a practitioner.For the new scientists, style was to be rigidly plain and unadorned.A tempered Ciceronian style was much more in practice,however,so they had to make a case for plainness, and they did so on the basis of propriety.A year after co-founding the Royal Society of London,Robert Boyle,in a perhaps canny anticipation of the effort that would be required to instantiate the new plainness, published Some Considerations Touching the Style of the Holy Scriptures (1661), in which he defends the “flat” ineloquence of the Bible on the grounds that it perfectly meets the rhetorical dictum of “congruity of [embellishments] to our design and method,and the suitable accommodation of them to the various circumstances considerable in the matter, the speaker, and the hearers.” Startlingly, he even pays homage to Machiavelli’s famous defense of his own plain style in The Prince,arguing that Machiavelli had chosen a plain style because “he thought fit either that nothing at all should recommend hisWork, or that only theTruth of the discourse should make it acceptable,and exact its welcome”(emphasis original). Boyle concluded:“If a meer Statesman, writing to a Prince, upon a meer civil Theme, could reasonably talk thus: with how much more Reason may God expect a welcoming Entertainment for the least Adorn’d parts of a Book, of which theTruth is a direct Emanation from the Essential and Supreme Truth, and of which the Contents concern no less than mans Eternal Happiness or Misery” (296). With little alteration, Boyle’s words could apply to the standards of scientific communication advanced by the Royal Society. Boyle employed his theory of propriety in all his works, writes John T. Harwood, in order to “create an audience”for his natural philosophy,wherein (note here the visual analogy)“clarity and eyewitness testimony were crucial to his ethos,his credibility ” (Harwood, lxi).The stylistic standards of scientific discourse adopted by the Royal Society were famously described by Thomas Sprat in his History of the Royal Society (1667) as spurning ornament.“Who can behold,” he asks,“without indignation, how many mists and uncertainties, these Tropes and Figures, have brought on our knowledge?” (112).The remedy was to “reject all the amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style; to turn back to the primitive purity, and shortness, when men deliver’d so many things, almost in an equal number of words” (113).2 This would seem to be a renunciation of rhetoric, and to the extent that he targets Ciceronian excess, Sprat was renouncing much of what was con54 A D A M S M I T H sidered to be “merely” rhetorical.3 Yet plainness is inescapably a style nonetheless...