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  • Authority Figures: Rhetoric and Experience in John Locke's Political Thought by Torrey Shanks
  • Daniel Carey
Torrey Shanks. Authority Figures: Rhetoric and Experience in John Locke's Political Thought. University Park: Pennsylvania State, 2014. Pp. xvi + 152. $69.95; $32.95 (paper).

With its punning title, Authority Figures packs a lot into a little space. With a text of 135 pages, including notes, this is a concise study, but its argument covers a great deal of ground: the thrust of the book is that Locke, as an empiricist philosopher, insists on the senses as the source of knowledge and by doing so undermines traditional claims to authority (for example, those made by innatists). At the same time, the process of making judgments is not straightforward because experience itself is rich but "unruly," requiring probable reasoning, and also because passions, interests, the will, and Locke's account of selfhood all complicate the human predicament. Amid this scenario, the question of language emerges and, with it, rhetoric. Locke, well known for his objections to figurative language, nonetheless requires "the materializing force of language to bear vivid witness to the human understanding and theorize its critical capacities," and thus he appropriates "key rhetorical elements" in his account. These "material words" are needed to establish alternative ways of "thinking and speaking that critically engage philosophical, social and political authority," which is where the title's pun comes into play.

Ms. Shanks writes with panache and authority, giving the discussion considerable vitality. The challenge of the topic is considerable: the focus of the book is on Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Two Treatises of Government, which together require attention to a considerable number of positions, densely argued by Locke, here confined into the space of a rather modest monograph. After a good deal of scene setting and assertions, we finally arrive at a substantial exposition of Locke's views in the third chapter, "Material Words and Sensible Judgment," with its claim that Locke relies on certain rhetorical figures to make his case in the domain of knowledge. The first specific example is that of analogy, "a mode of using experience to expand into the unfamiliar and the insensible." So far this seems familiar enough, in that Locke stands in a long tradition of endorsing analogical reasoning when conveying divine attributes. The case becomes more interesting when Ms. Shanks turns to language and the implications of the inaccessibility of real [End Page 175] essences of substances. In constructing general names for things we elevate particulars into the paradigmatic and thereby depend on metaphor and metonymy. The argument is convincing in relation to abstraction, as well as the reliance of speech on energeia to the extent that Locke's account of communication depends on our capacity to "excite the same Ideas in the Hearer" as we have in our own minds. I am less persuaded in relation to the category of mixed modes, an area of concepts in which the distinction between real and nominal essences does not obtain. According to Locke, we here have discretion to create our own definitions in this context, whether of justice, cruelty, liberality, and gratitude, or of notions like murder and sacrilege—definitions that relate to something in the world but where ostensive reference cannot convey the full meaning of the term. Here we are not really "elevating particulars" metonymically, as Ms. Shanks suggests.

The question is how far one wants to go in asserting that the underlying structure of Locke's argument derives from rhetoric. Ms. Shanks is influenced by Paul de Man's clever article providing a deconstructive analysis of Locke's attack on figurative language in "The Epistemology of Metaphor" (1978) in which he showed the inescapable dependence of Locke on tropes. She too affirms his relationship of "debt and denial" to rhetoric.

Chapter 4 shifts gears, moving from a concept of rhetoric as implicated (perhaps inadvertently) in Locke's theory of knowledge to a focus on Locke as a rhetorician (even if he disavows being one). Locke's attack on Filmer's patriarchalism in the "First Treatise" provides the subject of this chapter, with Ms. Shanks identifying one of Locke's...

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