Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity (review)

"Virtuality," "possibility," and "potentiality" have made significant inroads as terms in the critical lexicon of the humanities and social sciences in recent decades, and their vitality can be attested by the diverse range of disciplines that appeal to them to inform and structure current debates. Nancy Struever's recent study aims both to affirm the value of "possibility" in contemporary critical thought and to argue that the tradition of rhetorical inquiry can help illuminate not only how best to theorize possibility, but also how to maximize possibilities for interventions in contemporary political and critical practice. Like much of Struever's previous scholarly work, the greater part of this study focuses on the early modern period, especially Hobbes and Vico, but Struever also attempts in this book to extend her analysis of the rhetorical character of Hobbesian and Vichian thought to figures like Heidegger and Benjamin, and indeed to modernity in general. Drawing on Robert Pippin's interpretations of Hegelian idealism and the emergence of philosophical modernity, as well as Jaako Hintikka's reinterpretation of the "Principle of Plenitude" from Arthur O. Lovejoy's The Great Chain of Being, Struever argues that one of the central characteristics of modernist inquiry is a sustained interest in defining the conditions of possibility of human action, or, more radically, in theorizing the world as possibility. This interest, she argues, can be observed in Western thought considerably earlier than the post-Enlightenment world that serves as the focus of Pippin's work, and Struever aims to demonstrate the value of recovering some of the early theorists and practitioners of possibility.

Struever begins the book with a brief chapter that attempts to situate some of the central themes of her study in relation to broad tendencies in Classical thought. She notes that the "Classical, and archetypical 'contest of faculties,' rhetoric vs. philosophy" (1) manifests itself in Aristotle's work as a tension between the desire to systematize the world logically and the fear of slipping into determinism—"an unresolved tension between philosophy's necessitarian theses, and rhetoric's anti-necessitarian practices" (6). As Struever goes on to argue, this opposition between determinism and its other continues to motivate significant intellectual debates down to the present day, and a close attention to the ways in which this fundamental opposition is addressed in certain key thinkers can help us realize how to deal with it productively today.

The second chapter, which makes up a significant portion of the book, attempts to show the ways in which two key figures of early modern political and civil inquiry—Hobbes and Vico—attempt to handle this tension. One of the central features that distinguishes Hobbes and Vico from other early modern political thinkers, for Struever, is that, in attempting to recover certain aspects of Classical political philosophy, they eschew "the Classical strategy that assumes a moral philosophical foundation for politics" (42). Such a foundation, as Struever points out, tends to lead to narrowly prescriptive formulations. "The difficulty of the individualist moral program is that it is reductive [. . .]. In asserting that the account must give the one, unique plot of the unique agent's cause and effect, motive and action, it reduces the possibility of action to that one unique plot" (49). Struever singles out Hobbes and Vico as unique among early modern inheritors of the Classical tradition not only because they abstain from supplying prescriptive moralisms in their historical and political writings, but also because their unique conceptions of agency—of political cause and effect—precludes them from moralizing about individual action. The frameworks of their political and historical projects are grounded in a conception of agency as impersonal, one that does not reduce down to the choices of individual, moral beings. One cannot moralize without an agent about whom one can make moral proclamations, thus the emphasis on the impersonal prevents Hobbes and Vico from suggesting constraints for the potential actions that could follow from their work. The projects of these two philosophers thus "foster possibilities, attending to diversity rather than...