Glen Thurow and Jeffrey D. Wallin, eds.: Rhetoric and Statesmanship. Jointly published by Carolina Academic Press and The Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy. Durham, North Carolina, and Claremont, California, 1984.
Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, Vol. 13, No. 2, 1985. Republished with permission.
The senior editor intends “to recapture and examine the older tradition of republican rhetoric and to contrast it with the rhetoric dominating our public life today.” He would do so not for purposes of historiography but for purposes of statesmanship. As citizens forget the principles of republican government, the republican statesman’s task becomes, obviously, progressively dependent upon mere fortune. That statesman’s task involves understanding those principles and making them understood or, at least, sufficiently understood to withstand challenge. Understanding political principles requires speech—private speech, which is philosophic at its best, and public or rhetorical speech. But if we conceive of rhetoric as the use of words as weapons, and if we replace speech with ‘communication,’ we lose the distinctions between freedom and slavery, humanness and animality. The authors of the eight essays in this volume insist on these distinctions.
Eva T. H. Brann and Forrest McDonald examine the rhetoric of two American founders, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton. Brann gives a careful interpretation of Madison’s “Memorial and Remonstrance” to the Virginia Assembly, a petition against Patrick Henry’s bill establishing a provision for teachers of religion. Madison’s politically successful argument emphasizes the individuality of religious convictions, that is, the absolute duty of each person to God and the allegedly consequent right to privacy of conscience. This argument for religious liberty does not presuppose a doctrine of “mental liberty,” for Brann’s Madison believed opinions and beliefs involuntary. One might say that Madison reflects a paradox if not a contradiction of much modern thought: its enthusiasm for religious, political, and economic liberty based on a doctrine of mental determinism. Indeed, in private correspondence Madison advocated the encouragement of numerous small religious congregations (at times citing Voltaire as his source for this inspiration) in an argument he would reiterate in political terms during his famous treatment of, and for, faction. Madison’s Humean rhetoric of “measured passion and sober ardor” advanced a “harmonizing of the spirit of the Enlightenment and the claims of Christianity” (emphasis added).
McDonald recovers Hamilton’s distinction between popular and public opinion—the former being vulgar, the latter associated with the status and responsibility of manhood. Popular opinion is democratic; public opinion is republican. McDonald goes further, writing that in the 1780s Hamilton “learned from study of the principles of natural law that morality, in the long run, was a more stable foundation for government than was economic self-interest.” Hamilton, then, was an Aristotelian, McDonald claims, notwithstanding the somewhat dubious standing of natural law in Aristotle’s thought—a concept that appears only (as it happens) in the Rhetoric. McDonald acknowledges that in Federalist 31 Hamilton treats geometric and moral truths as equally certain, a more ‘Enlightenment’ than Aristotelian thing to do, but he insists that Hamilton did this only for rhetorical effect. McDonald also acknowledges Hamilton’s intellectual debts to Adam Smith and David Hume, without exploring their relation to Aristotelianism.
The rarity of traditional rhetoric may be seen in the fact that the editors select only one American, Calvin Coolidge, who is supplemented by Winston Churchill. Thomas B. Silver finds Coolidge’s central theme “not the exaltation of greed but the exhortation to virtue,” more, to “classical ideals.” Silver rejects the characterization of the Founders as Lockeans, insisting that “modern democracy does not arise out of the licentious impulses in the human soul. It arises as a response to arbitrary or artificial rule.” Far from rejecting human excellence or virtue, modern democracy presupposes the individual’s self-government, Silver argues. This edifying interpretation of the Founders’ thought must of course withstand a careful examination of what those great men meant by arbitrary or artificial and its opposite, the natural.
Larry P. Arnn presents a subtle argument concerning Churchill’s rhetoric. Examining two early Churchillian writings (an essay on rhetoric and a political novel), Arnn discovers a much more complex mind than most detractors or admirers have suspected. In the essay, Churchill writes that rhetoric manipulates human beings by exploiting both human ignorance and the human desire to know; by the use of analogy, connecting the known to the unknown, the concrete to the abstract, the finite to the infinite, the rhetorician wields what Churchill calls a weapon—one that can, in Arnn’s words, “dominate a political issue.” Churchill appears to redeem the rhetorician by claiming that he must be open and sympathetic to the people, sentimental and earnest. He is a manipulator, but not a “detached manipulator.” A detached manipulator might be a tyrant.
In Savrola, Churchill’s only novel, we find a somewhat different teaching. The rhetorician is “responsible for the actions of the crowd he addresses,” therefore not completely OF the people. “Savrola’s democracy…. is a democracy founded upon an unchanging standard, a standard that determines what constitutes excellence or superiority….” Discovering that standard requires private thought, not public speech or sympathy. Although Arnn does not explicitly say so, this means that the Churchillian rhetorician is something of a detached spectator. He is perhaps not quite a philosopher, either; he is an “independent statesman.” Rhetoric “unites the two aspects in [the independent statesman], the aspect having more to do with the urgencies of the moment, and the aspect having more to do with the enduring questions posed by politics.”
With the exception of Silver’s Coolidge, each of the “traditional” rhetoricians combines classical and modern thought in some way. Given limitations of space, none of the writers except Brann precisely measures the ratio of classical to modern. The volume’s other four writers discuss contemporary ‘rhetoric,’ better called “popular or mass rhetoric” (Jeffrey Tulis), “liberal democratic rhetoric” (John Zvesper), Holmesian rhetoric (Walter Berns), or “communication” (Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr.). Whatever it is called, there is no doubt concerning its modernity.
Tulis remarks that the Founders and almost all of the nineteenth-century presidents spoke to the people through Congress, appealing to Constitutional principles. The only one who did not was Andrew Johnson, and the tenth Article of Impeachment against him cited “intemperate, inflammatory, and scandalous harangues, delivered in a loud voice.” By contrast, Woodrow Wilson spoke to Congress through the people, anticipating the now-customary practice of attempting “to build ‘visions’ of the future out of undisciplined vulgarizations of leading strands of contemporary thought.” As a result, Tulis notes, Congressional deliberation atrophies, presidential thought declines to crowd level, and the people lose respect for their putative ‘opinion leaders.’
Zvesper describes the problem faced by Wilson’s political heir, Franklin Roosevelt. Observing that the word ‘rhetoric’ usually carries pejorative weight in contemporary progressive-liberal discourse, in which it conjures images of “passionate controversy” and “illiberal claims to power,” Zvesper sees that liberals must seek a way to “say something as strong as” passion and illiberality without becoming themselves illiberal. To do this progressive-liberals have little choice but play their own (as it were) rhetorical strength by combining “finality and progress,” “moderation and daring.” Roosevelt did not entirely succeed in this. He was too ‘conservative’ in the sense that he wrongly assumed U. S. industrialization had ended, that the political task was to more justly manage a permanently limited economy—a theme, it might be added, that has recurred in every generation of progressive-liberals since then. Administrators, captains of social work, would replace captains of industry, FDR hoped. In attempting to effect this replacement, Roosevelt not only neglected the persistence of entrepreneurial daring but occasionally neglected rhetorical moderation, as in his complaints against the “new despotism” of “economic royalists.” In a spirit of helpfulness, Zvesper encourages progressive-liberals to manifest “righteous anger” against individual opponent while eschewing expressions of “passionate hatred” aroused against a social/economic classes. This might prove a difficult line to walk.
Walter Berns finds a forerunner of Wilson not in the partisan political arena but on the Supreme Court. Owing in part to the influence of Oliver Wendell Holmes, “instead of defending constitutional principle from popular majorities, the Supreme Court… has come to see its function as that of imposing ‘modern authority’ on a population that is not disposed to accept.” As with the office of the presidency, this high trendiness causes the people to “lose respect” for the Constitution. As it must: progressivism points not to things past for its authority but to ‘the promise of American life,’ to the future. At best it can allow that the Constitution was ‘good for its time.’
Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., agrees with Berns that the phrase ‘modern authority’ constitutes a near-oxymoron. What is now called ‘communication,’ as distinguished from rhetoric, levels distinctions among citizens of different countries and in that sense is apolitical. Communication stresses novelty as against tradition and custom, the ‘rule’ of ‘intellectuals’ as against political rule, and the excitation of “feelings” (particularly compassion and indignation, sentiments associated with insecurity, mortality) as against religion or philosophy. Mansfield calls this “an idealism of materialism.” Not speech or deliberation but decision, tending toward the impassioned and the arbitrary, issues from this peculiar idealism. Among philosophers, Kant insisted on the moral importance of decision, but he was no simple materialist, and scarcely was one to valorize passion. “Today we might regard Kant’s confidence in knowing evil and good as naïve, but to make up for this, we assume with greater complacency than he that ignorance of good and evil do not matter.” By “we” Mansfield means democrats generally but democratic intellectuals preeminently. Such complacency tends to undercut intellectuality itself: “How can intellectuals retain their status if they admit that information has replaced deliberation and no longer assert that the intellect elevates them above others? To reflect on that question, a philosopher is needed.” The philosopher might begin by considering the mental determinism Brann ascribes to Madison and the extent to which it might come to weaken the deliberative capacity, over the generations. An intellectual historian might come to doubt whether Madison really considered himself and his colleagues to have been intellectually ‘determined’ at all; in any event, they didn’t act as if they did.
This book should strengthen the deliberative capacity of its readers and therefore deserves as large a readership as can be reconciled with deliberativeness.
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