Outward, Visible Propriety: Stoic Philosophy and Eighteenth-Century British Rhetorics.

• Author: Innocenti, Beth
• Position: Book review

Outward, Visible Propriety: Stoic Philosophy and Eighteenth-Century British Rhetorics. By Lois Peters Agnew. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2008; pp. vii + 203. $44.95 cloth.

Outward, Fisible Propriety: Stoic Philosophy and Eighteenth-Century British Rhetorics, Lois Agnew aims to document Stoic influences in eighteenth-century British rhetorics and to trace their decline in select nineteenth-century thinkers. Although her work would interest mainly those who study the history of thinking about rhetoric, it invites readers who study rhetorical practices-argumentation and advocacy-to reflect on assumptions about the place of rhetoric in society and how it works.

The book is comprised of an introduction, five chapters, and a conclusion. Agnew introduces relevant tenets of Stoicism and traces their presence and how they are adapted to new circumstances in eighteenth-century British rhetorics. She organizes the discussion around the concepts of sensus communis and common sense, taste, propriety, and sympathy. Throughout the discussion she returns to issues involved in the relationships of language and community and of individuals to society. In doing so, Agnew details a model of Stoic philosophy appropriated by eighteenth-century rhetorics. Broadly outlined, it looks like this: Individuals attempt to act in accord with nature and refine their ability to do so by cultivating common sense. Common sense connects individuals to society, because cultivating it involves interacting with others. Upon common sense are based individuals' aesthetic judgments and assessments of propriety more generally, and individuals make and refine their judgments through interactions with others. Making these judgments strengthens the sympathy necessary for social interaction and contributes to the welfare of society as well as individual development. This model collapses with a nineteenth-century rejection of common sense.

In the introduction Agnew outlines her argument: "the history of British rhetoric cannot be understood without attending to Stoic strains in influential language theories of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries" (p. 1). The "central objective" (p. 2) is to recapture these Stoic sources. She asserts that "[s]everal prominent figures, including Adam Smith, Henry Home, Lord Kames, Hugh Blair, George Campbell, and Richard Whately, bring Stoic ideas squarely into the history of rhetoric, as they draw both upon their own...