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Abstract
Recent scholarship treats Hugh Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783) as an effort to endorse either the liberal or the civic political traditions in eighteenth-century Scotland. This essay questions this orthodoxy by reading the Lectures, and in particular Blair's attention to considerations of rhetorical style, against their ideological and economic conditions and with a focus on how he seeks to adapt the civic political tradition of virtues—which today we might call the “bourgeois virtues”—to the emerging conditions of laissez-faire capitalism and the problem of excessive consumption in a growing commercial economy. Blair's appeal to a privatized cultural solution to the problems of economic excess presages similar efforts in contemporary times to negotiate the relationship between rhetoric and political economy under the conditions of late capitalism, and thus warrants renewed interest in his Lectures.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank Arthur Walzer, John Lucaites, and the QJS reviewers for their advice at various stages of this argument's production
Notes
1. Evan Watkins argues that this message is at the heart of many contemporary efforts to educate U.S. students about the economy.
In short, as might be expected, the content standards for basic economic literacy are all drawn straight out of familiar neoclassical principles. The circular reasoning, however, helps enforce perhaps the most significant lesson of all as the groundwork for NCEE [National Council on Economic Education] literacy: there's really nothing you can, or should, do about the economy. It will run itself fine if left alone, uncontaminated by exogenous factors or interference of any kind.
Evan Watkins, “Just Choose: Derivative Literacy as Economic Education” JAC 26 (2006): 598.
2. For instance, Bell has called installment buying a major cultural development because this practice replaced the word “debt,” a near swear word in Protestant vocabulary, with the morally neutral “credit,” thereby allowing immediate gratification of wants. In twentieth-century capitalism, this is one symptom of the larger turn from production to consumption, to the decay of culture (including religion), and to the heightening of a contradiction that might tear down the economy itself. If our economy depends on a practice of technocratic reservation, rational distribution, and careful allotment of resources with an eye towards future production, while our culture encourages immediate gratification and a collapsing of all temporal distinctions into the present, all spatial distinctions into the here and now, then the cultural and the economic arenas are in direct conflict with potentially disastrous results. See Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, 20th anniversary ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1996).
3. See Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class … and How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 267–82.
4. Deirdre McCloskey, The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 459–60.
5. McCloskey, Bourgeois Virtues, 8.
6. McCloskey, Bourgeois Virtues, 49.
7. Ronald Inglehart has collected data from forty-three countries, all pointing to a common trend: at a certain level of material comfort, people lose interest in economic issues (like sustenance, healthcare, job security), and they turn to cultural concerns. Inglehart locates the crucial moment at the point when per capita income exceeds US $3,000. Thereafter, cultural factors begin to trump economic concerns. See his Modernization and Postmodernization: Cultural, Economic, and Political Change in 43 Societies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).
8. See Robert Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985) and Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000). Rhetoricians try to correct capitalism's effects by countering civic disinterest (a byproduct of individualism and self-actualization through commercial consumption) with the classical rhetorical commitment to active citizenship. The renewed interest in classical rhetoricians like Isocrates is strikingly similar to Putnam's effort to build a cultural bulwark against the corrosive waves of Bell's derided consumer nation. See, for example, Takis Poulakis's Speaking for the Polis: Isocrates’ Rhetorical Education (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997) and Takis Poulakis and David Depew, ed., Isocrates and Civic Education (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004).
9. Robert Hariman has written most extensively on the political implications of rhetorical style, accusing contemporary scholars of ignoring the aesthetic dimension of persuasion, thereby overlooking a precept so obvious as to appear commonsensical: “To the extent that politics is an art, matters of style must be crucial to its practice.” See Political Style: The Artistry of Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 3. I return to Hariman's analysis of the “republican” style later in this essay.
10. Thomas Miller discusses the centripetal tendencies in Blair's rhetorical theory as well as his advocacy of liberal tolerance in The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces (Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh University Press, 1997), 234–45. Miller notes that Blair's rhetorical pedagogy of style encouraged discursive uniformity while also “advancing liberal tolerance.” In contrast to Miller, Franklin Court argues that Blair's lectures were entirely centripetal, establishing an authority about “good” discourse and insisting that students toe that line in their critical efforts. See Franklin Court, Institutionalizing English Literature: The Culture and Politics of Literary Study, 1750–1800 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 31–38. Richard Sher argues that Blair's work fit a larger pattern among Scottish intellectuals trying to claim moral authority against Jacobin upstarts from the highlands by flouting their own possession of cultural capital. In Blair's case, this effort at political domination resulted in an afferent or unifying construction of good rhetoric with the claim that only men of “taste” should be allowed political or cultural authority. See Richard Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985).
11. The Scottish banking industry had grown considerably by the eighteenth century, providing the investment capacity to spur production for profit. Scotland's affair with capitalism stimulated the upper and middle economic brackets, and their prosperity increased demand for paper, published texts, and even nonessentials like elaborate textiles and carriages. See T.C. Smout, “Where Had the Scottish Economy Got to by the Third Quarter of the Eighteenth Century?” in Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 45–72.
12. See, for instance, Blair's sermon “On the Influence of Religion upon Prosperity” in The Sermons of Hugh Blair (London: Cadell and Co., 1815), 1: 41–60. See also his “Sermon on the Power of Conscience,” 1:264–88. Subsequent references to Blair's sermons will appear parenthetically in the text.
13. Heckscher also discusses the fear of goods and the trade restrictions common to early mercantilists. See Eli Heckscher, Mercantilism, trans. Mendel Shapiro (London, IN: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1934), 2: 110.
14. Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Fania Oz-Salzberger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 241.
15. David Hume, Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987), 269–75.
16. Cicero says this in De Oratore, book 1, chapter 8. I rely on J.S. Watson's translation, printed in Cicero on Oratory and Orators (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970), 14.
17. Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. Linda Ferreira-Buckley and S. Michael Halloran (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005), 268. Subsequent references will appear parenthetically in the text.
18. On the civic tradition and its cyclical view of history, see J.G.A. Pocock's The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 76–79.
19. Lois Agnew argues a similar connection between Blair and the civic political tradition in “The Civic Function of Taste: A Re-Assessment of Hugh Blair's Rhetorical Theory,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 28 (1998): 25–36.
20. James Steuart, An Inquiry into Principles of Political Oeconomy, ed. Andrew S. Skinner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 1:268 (emphasis in the original).
21. In his Fable of the Bees (London: Edmund Parker, 1723), Bernard Mandeville argues that a society driven by self-interest will prosper and grow economically. According to Mandeville, much of what British society called “vice” was really the demand necessary to spur industry. He defended wine-makers, dice-makers, and tailors for creating goods that people would demand in greater quantity (82–83). He also dismissed concerns about “luxury,” saying that they were most often a thin appeal to morality so that people engaged in certain industries could restrict trade to their own benefit but at the consumer's expense (110–15). There is some speculation about whether or not Mandeville was being ironic. Surely, the Fable of the Bees can be read as a parody of the mercantilist advocacy of luxury, and there is textual support for this interpretation. Mandeville defended characters—such as thieves and prostitutes—who, even today, seem harmful to a nation's citizenry (82–83, 95). Whether Mandeville's argument was ironically stated or not, the public revulsion demonstrates that the civic tradition's concern about the corrupting influences of luxury still held ideological dominance in eighteenth-century Great Britain.
22. Steuart, An Inquiry, 1:268–69.
23. Steuart, An Inquiry, 1:280–81.
24. Hume advanced these arguments in his Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, 260–64. In volume 2, chapter 6 (166–71) of his Inquiry into the Principles of Political Oeconomy, Steuart says that passive foreign trade will create a demand for luxuries in a country living in “simplicity and idleness.” The inhabitants of this country will become more industrious in their agriculture so that they can trade for manufactured goods, and they will also develop local manufacturing to compete with the foreign traders. Thus, a taste for luxury, incited by exposure to foreign manufactured goods, creates industry, increases liberty, eliminates idleness, and improves the quality of life for all.
25. Hume, Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, 275–80.
26. For two representative moments when Hume reflected on good breeding, see his Treatise of Human Nature, ed. P.H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 597, and his Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, 132.
27. John Robertson, “The Scottish Enlightenment at the Limits of the Civic Tradition” in Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 177.
28. Gerard Hauser, Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spaces (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999), 21 (emphasis in the original).
29. Smith defended public funding and oversight of only the most rudimentary civic education for the poor to prepare them for participation in market activities. Otherwise, education should be left to the market. Citizens interested in cultivating their virtue would pay to do so. Smith also opposed public support of religious education, saying that it would not instill the civic virtue necessary for a functional society but would rather promote faction and despotism of one moral arrangement. Just as governmental support for education and religion offers no public service, so also governmental support of rhetorical education does nothing substantial. In point of fact, Smith criticized ancient Greek efforts to cultivate civic education, saying that the development of individual talent and virtue were best left to the market, as they were when the original teachers of rhetoric (Protagoras, Hippias, Gorgias) opened their schools. See The Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan (New York: Modern Library, 1994), 835–36.
30. Linda Ferreira-Buckley and S. Michael Halloran discuss Blair's admission policy and the civic mission at Edinburgh in their introduction to Blair's Lectures, xxxiii–xxxiv.
31. Hugh Blair, The Importance of Religious Knowledge to the Happiness of Mankind, A Sermon Preached Before the Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge…Monday, Jan. 1, 1750 (Edinburgh: A. Kincaid, 1750), 32.
32. Hariman, Political Style, 102.
33. Hariman, Political Style, 106.
34. Barbara Warnick attributes many of Blair's stylistic preoccupations to an intellectual debt that he owed French rhetorical theorists. Thus, she argues, the French belletristic theory of vraisemblance led to Blair's emphasis on stylistic adherence to what the audience finds normal and appropriate. Blair's theory of taste likewise appealed to an “internal reflex sense” common among all people. See The Sixth Canon: Belletristic Rhetorical Theory and its French Antecedents (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993), 14. Arthur Walzer likewise characterizes George Campbell's theory of “lively” prose as a psychological theory of verisimilitude's effects on the passions. See George Campbell: Rhetoric in the Age of the Enlightenment (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 65–74.
35. Hume's solution to the economically precipitated problem of luxurious surfeit manifests itself most clearly in his discussion of taste and rhetoric. Taste, according to Hume, can be developed by studying the arts, particularly poetry and eloquence. Such an effort leaves the individual able to discern between a reasonable flourish and an excessive bombast. See David Hume, “On the Delicacy of Taste and Passion” in Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, 3–8. The virtuous rhetorical medium lies between simplicity and refinement. The former quality is too austere and the latter too ostentatious. True to his civic intellectual forebears, Hume warned sternly against an excess of refinement because this “excess is both less beautiful, and more dangerous than”an excess of simplicity. He also noted that, in his own age of refinement, learning had progressed with the wind of commerce at its back, but this movement had also carried with it the danger of “an extreme.” For Hume, then, personal taste was the only bulwark against the kind of excessive luxury that he attributed to the “ASIATIC” Roman rhetoric “in the age of CLAUDIUS and NERO.” See Hume's Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, 194–96 (emphasis in the original). In his sermons, Blair, likewise, celebrated luxury's economic value but worried over its political and social effects, advocating the private cultivation of virtue to offset public corruption and emphasizing one virtue above all else: moderation. “Within these limits, we may safely enjoy all the comforts which the world affords, and our station allows. But if we pass beyond these boundaries, into the regions of disorderly and vicious pleasure, of debasing covetousness or of oppressive insolence, the world will then serve only to corrupt our minds, and to accelerate our ruin” (Sermons, 3:109).
36. See Halloran and Ferreira-Buckley's introduction to Blair's Lectures, xxxiv.
37. See Miller, Formation of College English, 238–39.
38. Sharon Crowley critiques Blair and his contemporaries for replacing classical theories of rhetorical invention and pedagogical exercises finding arguments with advice to observe and remember the subject of one's discourse. Crowley is certainly right about Blair—along with many of his contemporaries, he did rewrite the canon of invention. But his deft management of style and his articulation of a rhetorical pedagogy that emphasizes style with particular connection to bourgeois virtues constitute a valuable addition to the rhetorical tradition. See The Methodical Memory: Invention in Current-Traditional Rhetoric (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), 52–54.
39. John Trimble, Writing with Style: Conversations on the Art of Writing, 2nd ed. (Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2000), 65.
40. Jay P. Childers and Jaime Doyle, “Skills for Communicating Effectively” in Professional Communication Skills, 3rd ed., ed. Anna M. Young and John A. Daly (New York: Pearson, 2008), 204–6.
41. The most sustained criticism of employing stylistic abstractions to teach rhetoric appears in Robert Connors's Composition-Rhetoric: Backgrounds, Theory, and Pedagogy (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997). Connors is particularly derisive of Blair:
After Blair, the most common stylistic methods nearly always revolved around the categorization of a writing style under some general descriptive adjective meant to characterize the style or its qualities in some subjective way.… Taken together, Blair's various characterizations of style and sentences comprise quite a lengthy list of abstract nouns (perspicuity, purity, propriety, precision, clearness, unity, strength, harmony) and abstract adjectives (concise, diffuse, nervous, feeble, dry, plain, neat, elegant, flowery, simple, affected, and vehement). Here is God's plenty, indeed, and it is from the vast storehouse of Blairian terms that the nineteenth century drew much of its arid style theory and pedagogy. (260–61)
42. George Kennedy defines the letteraturizzazione of rhetoric as “the tendency of rhetoric to shift its focus from persuasion to narration, from civic to personal contexts, and from discourse to literature,” in Classical Rhetoric and its Christian and Secular Tradition: From Ancient to Modern Times (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 5. Kennedy acknowledges Blair's debt to classical sources, such as Quintilian, but argues that Blair turned rhetoric towards “literary composition and belles letters” (240).
43. McCloskey says, “We don't need avaricious production or vulgar consumption or unloving work-obsession on account of some wider social prudence they are supposed to serve, allegedly keeping us employed.” See McCloskey, Bourgeois Virtues, 459.
44. While McCloskey finds merit in the bourgeois virtue of courage, which leads people to bold pursuits, she worries that this same virtue could result in the behaviors and the praise of distinctly horrific people who pursue their own advantage and aggrandizement to the public's detriment. She concludes that courage needs temperance to countervail the bourgeoisie's tilt towards reckless pursuit of private interest. McCloskey says of the capitalist who embodies a poor sense of warrior courage without the needed habits of prudence and temperance:
The CEO who dreams himself an artist of war, a samurai or general, is thereby encouraged not to notice that in the boardroom his actual will behaves habitually in the service not of real ethical courage, in taking prudent risk, say, or in standing up to the latest accounting trick, but in the service of pride and envy and covetousness.
She also contends that proper attention to the bourgeois virtues, temperance and courage included, can ward off corruption. See McCloskey, Bourgeois Virtues, 245–47.