• theorizing

"[W]e are prone to fall under the spell of our own intellectual heritage. . .[for] it is easy to become bewitched into believing that the ways of thinking . . . bequeathed to us by the mainstream of our intellectual traditions must be *the* ways of thinking about them. Given this situation, one of the contributions that historians can make is to offer us a kind of exorcism." --Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics I, p. 6. This observation is especially true of our histories of rhetoric, methinks. Older readers may recall that Floyd Anderson once referred to Douglas Ehninger's "On Systems of Rhetoric" as a "Whig history" of rhetoric. "Whig" histories, as Herbert Butterfield famously denoted them, are written with the unexamined assumption that the past exhibits a clear trajectory towards the telos of the present. This morning I found an interesting distinction between "Whig" and "Jacobite" histories in James Alexander's essay on Oakeshott and Skinner, "An Essay on Historical, Philosophical, and Theological Attitudes to Modern Political Thought," History of Political Thought 25 (2004): 116-148 at 137: "for such history is either Whig, in the sense that it traces the triumphant history of conceptions of contemporary significance, or Jacobite, in the sense that it traces the tragic history of conceptions which were not necessarily of great historical significance but which are conceptions the historian would like to see restored to contemporary significance." Alexander characterizes Skinner as a Whig and Pocock as a Jacobite. Rhetorical theorists/historians of my generation have seemed to be mostly Jacobites of a sort, with their "piacular rites" for lost causes. I never got a report from last June's RSA conference session on historiography--does anyone have some thoughts to share?

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