The Ethics of Rhetoric

Rating:
Summary: An Unacknowledged Masterpiece
Review: Except for the final entry in this masterly collection of essays, "Ultimate Terms in Contemporary Rhetoric," which has been widely reprinted in anthologies, the contributions of Weaver, a late professor of rhetoric at the University of Chicago, are not generally known. Yet at his best, Weaver's essays bear comparison with those of his favorite George Orwell. Like Orwell, Weaver was one of the truest humanists of our age and hence really cannot be accurately described with our labels of left-wing, centrist, or right-wing. Exposing the vicious or stupid to champion the humanly valuable was his forte; having a seemingly unerring sensibility for doing this, Weaver is always able to surprise his readers, forcing them to hold little dialectics with themselves to discover their ultimate beliefs and terms of persuasion. Whether he is restoring to a central place in the educational experience and in political speech the role of Eros, or explaining why Edmund Burke was a liberal but Abraham Lincoln a conservative, Weaver is always both a shock and a joy to read.

Rating:
Summary: Arguments were not well supported
Review: I read this book a few years ago, after reading Weaver's wonderful "Ideas Have Consequences." I'm not sure what his motivations were for glorifying Lincoln and demonizing Burke. But I found myself reading his examples of Lincoln, which he holds up as examples of "arguing from Genus," and seeing many of the same rhetorical tactics used by Burke that he attacks as "arguing from circumstance." I really think that you have to read these passages with a prejudice towards viewing them the way that Weaver does, in order to reach the same conclusions. If you apply his own reasons for attacking Burke to passages by Lincoln, you'll see that his arguments are not well supported.

Even so, it's a good exercise in critically thinking about rhetoric.

Rating:
Summary: Persuasion
Review: If you have ever tried to persuade anyone of anything, you have probably had to confront the truism that Russell Kirk added to his pillars of conservatism: Man is not moved by reason alone.

Richard Weaver wrote that Plato was preoccupied throughout his life by the problem of rhetoric: if truth alone was insufficient to persuade, what could be added to assist it? In The Ethics of Rhetoric, Weaver examined these additions -- the tools of rhetoric -- and how they might be used. His topics included the argument from circumstance and definition as they applied to Burke and Lincoln respectively, Milton's prose, the Scopes trial, the language of social science, the spaciousness of old oratory, the parts of speech, and the use of "god-" and "devil-terms."

The two chapters that deal with Lincoln are among Weaver's best. Despite his sympathies with the old South, he does a fine job of proving Lincoln's profound conservatism, his imaginative, literary, and rhetorical abilities, his courageous leadership and deep integrity.

On the other hand, I think Weaver misreads Burke, falling prey to the legalistic absolutism which divides reality into either/or constructs. I do not consider Burke a liberal simply because he occasionally argued from circumstance. What number of uses of the argument from circumstance confer upon one the status of conservative or liberal? Seven arguments from circumstance versus five from definition? Here we see Weaver trying to divide the world into rows and columns.

I am inclined to agree with Disraeli that a statesman is a practical man, to some degree the creature of his age, who determines what is needful at a given time and place. Robert Nisbet has written that only a revolutionary like Robespierre would say "perish the colonies rather than a principle." In politics expediency and principle perform an intricate dance. There need not be all one or the other. One of the reasons Kirk eschewed the label of ideology for conservatism, and preferred the notion of prudence, was that conservatism took into account the actual rather than trying to impose upon the world a manifesto of what was theoretically possible. Many of the mistakes I see in political debate are a result of the tendency to absolutize something which is not absolute and thereby substitute for thought some ready formula.

Criticisms aside, I found The Ethics of Rhetoric to be Weaver's most useful book, with little of the old Southern jeremiad and loathing of modernity which characterize much of his work. Many strong passages illuminate the way in which language is used and misused. That subject grows more pertinent when we are deluged with information by ever more complex means. More pressure is exerted on us to separate the true from the false, the rhetorically ethical from the unethical.