Rhetoric & Democracy: Pedagogical and Political Practices (review)

The chapters in this edited collection come from papers originally presented at the Brigance Colloquy at Wabash College in April 2005, in honor of W. Norwood Brigance, who was a professor at Wabash from 1922 until 1960 and a leading light in the development of the field of rhetorical studies. Although this book highlights Professor Brigance's many contributions—from the passages quoted, it is clear that he was a top-notch democratic theorist whose essays on war, rhetoric, and democracy I will soon be tracking down from the library—the value of the book comes from the quality of the contributors and how they use Brigance's work as a springboard to raise interesting questions about democracy and chart future paths for rhetorical research.

In his excellent chapter "William Norwood Brigance and the Democracy of the Dead," Martin Medhurst divides the history of the field of rhetorical studies into six eras, demonstrating with archival research and multiple charts that Professor Brigance dominated the early history of our field and that "the contemporary state of rhetorical studies owes as much to W. Norwood Brigance as to any other single scholar of the founding" (4). Like everything Medhurst does, his case is meticulous and convincing. But what I find most interesting about the chapter is how it provides a second introduction to the volume: this book is populated by scholars who have been integral to what Medhurst calls "the rhetorical renaissance," the maturation of our field into a major scholarly force during Era 6 (c. 1990–2005). In turn, the book's audience is clearly the scholars of Era 7, an era that has not yet been written. From the scholars of the past to the scholars of the future, I read this book as an impassioned plea for a renewed emphasis on rhetoric's civic roots and its potential to enrich democratic life.

The editors, Todd F. McDorman and David M. Timmerman, position the purpose of the volume in the following terms: "this volume is intended to be a resource for students and scholars of rhetoric in making the best use of the past of the discipline, setting forth some of the best work and thinking on rhetoric and democracy in the present, and challenging rhetorical studies in terms of what it can become and contribute in the future" (xii). It is indeed such a resource, and the lineup of contributors is impressive: Medhurst, Denise Bostdorff, Mike Hogan, James Herrick, David Zarefsky, Shawn Parry-Giles, Stephen Hartnett and Greg Goodale, Gerald Hauser, and Bob Ivie. Their essays cover a range of theoretical conceptions and historical moments, and I learned something new from each chapter.

The study of democratic deliberation is generally indebted to a model of communicative reason like that developed by, on the one hand, Habermas and Benhabib, or on the other, Guttmann and Thompson. Although oft en helpful, these models are not rhetorical. As Hauser notes, "the current multidisciplinary discussion has left rhetoric mostly on the sidelines, either as an assumed activity whose bearing on the meaning of deliberative democracy goes undiscussed, or as a risky form of discourse that threatens to destabilize communicative action" (227). These essays collectively ask: what would it mean for scholars of deliberative democracy to take rhetoric seriously? What are, as Hauser puts it, "democracy's rhetorical requirements" (227)? The contributors to the volume provide several intriguing answers. For Hogan, democracy's rhetorical requirement is the recognition that citizens have a responsibility to be rhetorical critics: they must be capable of slicing through the bull and of producing speech worth hearing. This raises the question: what is speech worth hearing? Who gets to decide? And, for that matter, what does it mean for citizens to become rhetorical critics? This common refrain deserves careful consideration. Hartnett and Goodale offer one example of what this type of civic rhetorical criticism might look like as they investigate how public address about national defense is structured...