I happily find myself part of a thriving theory community in upstate New York, centered around the SUNY Albany political theory workshop. My colleagues, Morton Schoolman and Peter Breiner, have been continuously supportive and encouraging. The lively circle of feminist political theory that I share with Laurie Naranch and Lori Marso has made Albany feel like home.
I am fortunate to have had teachers, advisors, and intellectual interlocutors who remain unparalleled models for me of rigorous and creative scholarship in political theory. Although not connected with this project, Michael Rogin and Hanna Pitkin first introduced me to the study of political theory, and its relation to language and culture especially. This project benefited greatly from Kirstie McClure’s generous comments, which have richly repaid close rereading and re-thinking (both the comments and Locke). I am grateful to Bonnie Honig, whose seminars first introduced me to Locke’s Essay and its strange and fascinating denizens. Her insightful comments have often inspired me to think more expansively and creatively. Thanks to Linda Zerilli, whose exemplary engagement in political and feminist theory has taught me so much. Her ongoing support of this project has been invaluable.
I am grateful to my family, who have followed the ups and downs of this project for many years and provided much needed breaks from it: my parents, Janetta and Noel Shumway and Ralph and Lisa Shanks, as well as Laurel Shanks and Mark Wegner, John Thompson, and Shailaja and Ramesh Chandra, and not least, Clover, my cosmopolitan cat. Thanks to Brandi Alund-Welsh for her outstanding care for my son.
There is no repaying the debts of patience and support from my partner, Ambarish. I can only say happily that in other futures, there will now be other projects, for both of us. I most look forward to continuing our shared project that arrived just as this manuscript approached completion, our son, Jasper Bal, who brings joy and havoc.
RHETORIC AND SITUATED POLITICAL CRITIQUE
The emergence of modern political theory in the seventeenth century marks a watershed moment in which new conceptions of human reason take center stage in theorizing the foundations and limits of political authority and community. This elevation of modern reason is widely seen as bringing about a break with the rhetorical tradition, inaugurating a supposed hostility between rhetoric and political theory that continues to resonate today. In this book, I challenge this assumed enmity between political theory and rhetoric through the unlikely figure of John Locke. Traditionally cast in a dual and decidedly modern role as rationalist in political theory and empiricist in philosophy, Locke is rarely seen as a friend to rhetoric. This opposition confirms latter-day assumptions about reason’s incompatibility with rhetoric that are familiar to late modern readers. By contrast, historians of rhetoric, philosophy, and science provide compelling reasons to reconsider this opposition in the early modern period, especially with regard to early empirical philosophers such as Locke. Locke’s relationship to the rhetorical tradition, as we will find, is better understood as one of debt and denial.1 While Locke undoubtedly voiced criticisms of the power of eloquence to lead us astray, I contend that Locke draws on rhetoric in fundamental ways in both his philosophical and political writings. Specifically, his appropriation of elements of the rhetorical tradition is indispensable for his critical engagements with philosophical and political authority. Rhetoric offers Locke a productive and creative capacity that sustains his challenge to reigning doctrines of his day as well as his reimagining of social and political membership. Locke’s debt to rhetoric undergirds his new vision of political community reliant upon an ongoing practice of critical judgment.
Rhetoric and Political Theory
The notion of the lasting significance of a momentous break in the early modern period between rhetoric and political theory is given particularly clear formulation by Bryan Garsten in Saving Persuasion. Garsten identifies a “rhetoric against rhetoric” in the work of Hobbes, Rousseau, and Kant that inaugurated a powerful legacy of suspicion and distrust of rhetoric in political theory. Juxtaposing the treatment of rhetoric and politics by Aristotle and Cicero with the work of these early modern critics, he shows how a particular modern distrust of rhetoric is inextricably tied to a suspicion of persuasion and political judgment more generally. The lasting effects of this hostility between rhetoric and political theory persist today—most notably, for Garsten, among those theorists who seek to ground democratic deliberation and authority in rational rather than persuasive discourse. By contrast, Garsten seeks to revalue political judgment that appeals to arguments and audiences located on the contingent terrain of politics, and for this he turns to the insights of the rhetorical tradition. Rhetoric, in this tradition, is not restricted to “merely” eloquent speech; rather, it involves a mode of action and interaction of situated political actors and spectators seeking influence and appealing to one another’s judgment. Moreover, we find that the status of rhetoric is a central question for the practice and theory of politics. This was clearly the case for early modern theorists, and it should be recognized as such by political theorists today.
Saving Persuasion rightly invites us to see rhetoric as centrally important for political thought, but its definition of rhetoric as “speech designed to persuade” puts significant limits on this relationship.2 To conceive of rhetoric in terms of persuasion is an important corrective to political theories that assert the need for an external point or prior agreement from which to assess social and political arrangements. Appealing to judgment from “within our existing opinions” recalls political theory to the finite terrain of politics, marked indelibly by disagreement between diverse opinions and beliefs of passionate actors.3 Working with such a narrow definition, however, cuts short the political possibilities and projects that rhetoric might sustain. In particular, a politics of persuasion cannot account for the possibility that existing opinions and beliefs, serving as the grounds of judgment, may prove inadequate to current and emerging political conditions. A political community may find existing categories inadequate because of unpredictable events or the contingent consequences of human action, such as the novelty that characterizes both political freedom as well as the rise of totalitarianism, as Hannah Arendt reminds us.4 A political community, or some part of it, may need to challenge common opinions and beliefs because they are inadequate to their claims of freedom or justice. A rhetoric identified only with persuasion among existing opinions cannot provide the basis for this indispensable form of critical judgment.
How do political communities generate such new categories for challenging social and political arrangements? If they come from within established norms and practices, how can they achieve critical purchase on the status quo? These questions invite many to assert that claims to freedom and justice require a position external to politics, detached from customary practices and prejudices. Such an external position can be found in Rawls’s original position as well as in Habermasian arguably quasi-transcendental norms arising from, but ultimately transcending, specific historical and cultural locations. In their seeking universality, it is precisely their ultimate detachment from particular social and political contexts that is a necessary condition of their normative purchase.5 Rhetoric and imagination may even be brought into the service of this desired detachment in the form of thought experiments and exemplary rhetorical cultures. Yet the goal of such an external standpoint toward politics, whatever its debts to rhetoric and imagination (avowed or not), posits a fundamental distrust of the political judgment of the people.6 The idea of a view from nowhere, the Archimedean point, signals a flight from politics in general and democracy in particular. It is only through politics that relations of justice and the conditions of freedom are secured in practice, that is, as lived experience.
Extending this critique further, we must keep in mind that insofar as such an external position is linked to abstract universalism, aspiring to detachment from particular political conditions limits the normative value of the plurality and material differences that condition and constitute political life.7 Abstract universal norms often have been credited with delegitimating practices emphasizing class-, sex-, or race-based distinctions. Through their abstract and universal