Trained Capacities: John Dewey, Rhetoric, and Democratic Practice ed. by Brian Jackson and Gregory Clark (review)

Relatively few scholarly books are read cover to cover, and fewer edited volumes still. By dint of its cohesiveness, critical interventions into rhetorical studies’ root practices and theories, and elucidation of Deweyan pragmatism, Trained Capacities deserves to join collections like Andrea Lunsford’s Reclaiming Rhetorica and Walter Jost and Michael Hyde’s Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Our Time in being so read. This is not to say that Trained Capacities is wholly persuasive; a never well-justified American exceptionalism bubbles up throughout, alongside more minor points of concern. But the horizons the text opens are as vital for rhetoricians redefining our relationships to a deeply circumscribed democracy as they are instructive for readers new to Dewey and pragmatism. Taken as a whole, the volume is an excellent primer on Dewey and an important work on democratic rhetorical theory, lucidly articulating—and offering compelling answers to—questions every public-oriented rhetorician today must confront. Trained Capacities is, in other words, that rare object: an edited collection that is (a) instructive in an area where instruction is badly needed; (b) constructive of a compelling, broadly useful framework for theoretical, critical, and pedagogical work; and (c) well articulated as a coherent whole.

Trained Capacities sets out, as editors Brian Jackson and Gregory Clark put it, to “establish Dewey as an essential source for . . . the project of teaching others how to compose timely, appropriate, useful, and eloquent responses” to democracy’s “diverse and often contentious rhetorical situations” (4). It succeeds in this, attending thoughtfully to a swath of Dewey’s writings on the trained capacities that democracy fosters and requires. Indeed, the volume should be read for insight into how a pragmatist epistemology and a practical commitment to democracy, taken together, entail rhetorical, communal approaches to education. In proposing a Deweyan vision of what rhetoricians do and should teach and study, the collection deepens the very idea of “education,” incorporating questions about the meaning and value of theory and criticism generally and demonstrating the possibilities of a contemporary rhetorical humanism. The volume begins with a substantive introduction from Jackson and Clark, who argue that ethical rhetorical practices and rhetorical education are equally crucial to the development of democratic culture—and that Dewey’s corpus is a privileged site for both. The text then divides into three parts, with five central essays on “Dewey and His Interlocutors” (part 2) girded by three apiece on “Dewey and Democratic Practice” (part 1) and “Dewey as Teacher of Rhetoric” (part 3).

Part 1 of Trained Capacities takes its lead from William Keith and Robert Danisch’s meditation on Dewey’s democratic epistemology, “Dewey on Science, Deliberation, and the Sociology of Rhetoric.” Though readers may question the aptness of Keith and Danisch’s orienting phrase (“sociology of rhetoric”), and might well doubt that Dewey’s project is all so “uniquely American” (43), the essay delivers a powerful articulation of Deweyan science as collective judgment about the probable: oriented toward action and requiring, as the linchpin of democracy, quality rhetorical education for all. This view of science prepares a reader to apprehend Scott Stroud’s “John Dewey, Kenneth Burke, and the Role of Orientation in Rhetoric” as considering where, precisely, rhetorical education might best intervene: in our largely unconscious motivational structures. Such intervention, Stroud suggests, is central to Deweyan artful living; to live artfully entails rhetorical self-invention, and if democracy entails a community living artfully, democratic education must foster our capacities to “use rhetoric to recraft our lives” (61). Paul Stob’s “Minister of Democracy: John Dewey, Religious Rhetoric, and the Great Community” explores Dewey’s own approach to working rhetorically to foster a more artfully scientific, democratic public. Dewey’s response to antievolutionist William Jennings Bryan, Stob argues, develops a religious rhetoric that can supersede antiscience religious rhetorics by offering a “democratic view of deliverance” (80). These three essays...