Reagan and Public Discourse in America.

• Author: Legge, Nancy J.

The goal of this volume is to assess President Ronald Reagan's impact on public discourse. The editors contend that their focus on assessing the quality of public discourse is justified because it is where the "Reagan administration will prove to have had its almost lasting, if not its greatest, impact" (p. 5) and because "Reagan's impact on the quality of public discourse will prove to be pervasive and profound" in that it establishes a pattern for limiting the range of viable positions and opposition (pp. 5-6).

The book explorers Reagan's rhetoric in four areas. Part I explores the Invention of Reagan's Discourse; Part II discusses The Style of Reagan's Discourse; Part III provides Foreign Policy Case Studies; and Part IV examines Domestic Policy Case Studies. Each part contains three essays that explore the particular aspect of Reagan's rhetoric appropriate to that section.

The first section of the book is dedicated to the invention of Reagan's rhetoric, or to the process of creating and shaping arguments. Weiler and Pearce examine how Reagan, through the process of ceremonialization, shrank the sphere of public discourse. Goodnight discusses the four day 1988 Moscow Summit and its key events. In contrast to Weiler and Pearce, Goodnight contends that "provoking controversy [Reagan] loosed oppositional discourses at home and abroad" (p. 71). In effect, Reagan invited public discussion of some of the values he expressed and supported. Carter's essay analyzes Reagan's discourse at the London Guildhall just after the Moscow Summit. Carter notes that Reagan skillfully adapted to his British audience by explicitly praising the British military while implicitly pointing to shortcomings of British leadership; thus, Reagan reinforced the need for U.S. leadership and input.

Part II of the volume examines The Style of Reagan's Discourse. Auer's essay is an informative one that reiterates that most of us know: Reagan was an actor before he was a president, and he used his management; however, if a union goes on strike it is engaging in "nonrational persuasion." Her distinction is not grounded in the common false dichotomy between coercion and persuasion but instead in the assertion that argument is concerned only with people trying to justify their claims rationally. It appears that nondiscoursive persuasion is arbitrarily defined out of the realm of argument because of the difficulty of fitting it into a traditional model of informal logic.

Govier...