Pragmatism, Democracy, and the Necessity of Rhetoric.

• Author: Lee, Michael J.
• Position: Book review

Pragmatism, Democracy, and the Necessity of Rhetoric. By Robert Danisch. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2007; pp. 190. $39.95 cloth.

John Dewey's talk at Cooper Union on December 7, 1941 was rifled "Lessons from the War in Philosophy." Ignoring the calamity in Hawaii that morning, he focused solely on the Great War. Robert Danisch appropriately begins his incisive Pragmatism, Democracy, and the Necessity of Rhetoric by explaining Dewey's failures as a speaker that day. The shortcoming of Dewey's address, Danisch insists, stemmed from "pragmatism's inability to develop a suitable rhetoric embedded in its own principles" (p. 2). The broader version of this claim, pragmatism needs rhetoric, is developed throughout the book, but the converse claim, rhetoric needs pragmatism, is advanced more sporadically. Danisch envisions classical rhetoric and pragmatism as twin projects with different vocabularies but shared commitments, and he uses the central concepts of the rhetorical tradition to highlight their substantial overlap. He writes, "Classical rhetoric and pragmatism share a specific orientation to the world, an orientation that informs the beliefs and practices of each" (p. 2). Both intellectual projects take as facts the instability of meanings, social flux, human uncertainty, and the absence of time-immemorial truths; both projects are pluralist and anthropocentric; both are concerned with social processes, persuasion, and developing the resources of good judgment.

The book's seven chapters are organized around five case studies that detail the rhetorical sensibilities of influential pragmatists. Following an introduction that succinctly develops the central premises of pragmatism and classical rhetoric, the first two case studies, on William James and John Dewey, aim to prove that rhetoric, although seldom mentioned by these thinkers, was actually central to their thinking about democracy. In the remaining case studies, Danisch considers the contributions of three influential pragmatists, Jane Addams, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Alain Locke, in light of the constituent elements of deliberative, forensic, and epideictic rhetoric.

Danisch argues that James' most influential writings about pragmatism, A Pluralistic Universe, Pragmatism, and The Will to Believe in particular, implicitly develop a philosophy of rhetoric. James' pluralism mirrored Protagoras' "human-measure" principle, Gorgias' nominalism in On the Nonexistent...