The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the
Cultures of Theory by Amanda Anderson,
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2006). 202 pp.

SCOTT F. CRIDER is Associate Professor of English
and Director of the Writing Program at the University
of Dallas. He is author of The Office of Assertion:
An Art of Rhetoric for the Academic Essay (2005).

It’s hard out there for a liberal literary
critic, so, as an old-fashioned liberal who
went to graduate school in the 1990’s when
the approved theories did not allow for
liberalism, let alone conservatism, I find
Amanda Anderson’s The Way We Argue
Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory
refreshing since her rhetorical goal is to
refine and restore (through theoretical sophistication,
not mere reaction) three principles
of liberal thought which literary theory
appeared for a time to vanquish—freedom,
universalism, and reason—in order to defend
and enact a Habermasian “communicative
ethics” for the discourse of the academy. And
she does refine and restore them, at least for
the “we” of her audience—literary critics
who may have noticed that their contemplative
pronouncements are in a pretty serious
quarrel with their active lives—though it
should be noted that plenty of us who encountered
literary theory did not give up on
any of the above principles and said so.

On philosophical grounds, I am inspired
by Anderson’s arguments and her example;
even so, on literary ones, I am somewhat
dispirited. She is the chair of English literature
at Johns Hopkins University, but during
the whole of her good book she fails to
engage imaginative literature itself. This is
due to her focus, to be fair: the theoretical
assumptions of literary theorists. Yet, sadly,
one of the ways they argue about literature
now is that they don’t; instead, they argue
about arguing about it. But let me discuss her
theoretical achievement. The book has three
sections, one for each of its topics: Part I
concerns freedom; II, universalism; and III,
reason.

Parts I and II are fascinating. In Part I,
“Critical Practices,” Anderson examines “the
Habermas-Foucault debate” within feminist
literary criticism, during which the ancient
question of freedom and fate is addressed
through the topic of gender, first in a critique
of Judith Butler’s strict constructionism in
her discussion of gender, during which Anderson
shows that its Foucauldian fatalism cannot
be rationally reconciled with Butler’s
own call for performative subversion since
subversion presumes the very freedom denied,
and then in a discussion of the same
topic in Victorian literary studies. Anderson’s
refutation is compelling.

In Part II, “Living Universalism,” she
examines the revival of “cosmopolitanism,”
which she sees as a corrective both to the
imperialistic universalism that is really only a
projected particularism and to the
multicultural nativism that is really only an
inbred tribalism. According to her, both
universalism and nativism fail to do justice to
the human capacity for moderate transcendence
in relation to the traditions of one’s
own culture in respectful response to those of
other cultures. To develop her case, she
examines the relationship between epistemological
realism and ethical norms.

Though in Parts I and II Anderson mentions
Habermas and the argument of “communicative
ethics,” it is only in Part III,
“Ethos and Argument,” the most original
and important part of the study, that she
develops the case at length, attempting to
save reason from its poststructural detractors
by arguing for ethos, instead of “identity,” as
a qualifying influence upon Enlightenment
reason. For Anderson, what is missing in both
bureaucratic rationality and identity politics
is virtue. The heart of her case comes in the
last two chapters of Part III, during the first
of which she manages the debate between
Foucault and Habermas over the former’s
apparent conversion from fatalism to freedom
with respect to ethical reasoning, and
during the second of which she uses Lionel
Trilling’s distinction between “sincerity” and
“authenticity”—the former operates within
conventions, while the latter critiques and
transgresses them—to defend liberal
proceduralism. She employs ethos instead of
“character” because, as she puts it, “[T]he
term tends to cover both individual and
collective understandings of practice” (134),
and because she opposes the conservative
argument in favor of “character” since it is,
according to her, too individualistic. Anderson
argues that the late Foucault argued for
ethos, Habermas apparently for logos alone,
but she then shows that Habermas too believes
in ethos, the ethos of argument—that is,
a habit, in theory and in practice, of rational
argument open to its own limitations as it
aspires to a true universalism.

Through its political culture of democratic
debate and its legal one of constitutional
law, modern liberalism offers the best
hope for a multicultural America in a globalized
world, and its central virtue should be
the ethos of argument. (It should be noted that
she does take up the most difficult test case,
though too briefly—that of the West’s response
to Islam—in her discussion of France’s
political discussion of the hijab.) She concludes,

The process of argument is what enables the very
act of pluralist self-clarification to occur, and the
society in question must cultivate an ethos of
argument if it is to meet the ongoing challenges
of its political (re)constitution. (187)

One would like to know how Anderson
would respond to moments when argument
is impossible—when violence thwarts
proceduralism—but should Anderson persuade
contemporary literary theorists to rethink
their suspicion of reason, she will have
provided an important service to us all.

Much of her argument is indeed persuasive,
yet not completely so to this reader
because she neglects the study of ethos in the
art of rhetoric. Though she is apparently not
aware of the fact, ethos in Aristotle’s Rhetoric
is a rich ethical and political term that can
refer either to the speaker’s character or the
audience’s. She does draw upon the Aristotelian
ethical tradition, but she never refers to
the Aristotelian rhetorical tradition, which is
a surprising omission since the relationship
between virtuous character and true argument
in the service of the good in deliberative
rhetoric, the just in judicial, and the
noble in epideictic is perhaps his central
interest there. Eugene Garver’s Aristotle’s
Rhetoric: An Art of Character could have
deepened her understanding of ethos and of
the “virtue ethics” tradition itself. Habermas’
reliance upon both Kant and Marx keeps
Anderson from the more ample understanding
of ethos that informs Aristotle’s ethical,
rhetorical and political understanding. For
Aristotle’s Rhetoric, ethos is the result of a
speaker’s practical wisdom, virtue and good
will (2.1.5); that is, it is intellectual, moral
and social.

As well, the Rhetoric would have given her
the understanding of emotion or pathos she
mentions as a good, yet does not discuss in
any detail. Habermasian liberals might be
tempted to neglect the rhetorical tradition
since, as Anderson explains, Habermas is
critical of civic republicanism—the child of
humanism and rhetoric in the early modern
period. They should resist the temptation in
order to cure liberal proceduralism of potentially
inhumane tendencies; after all, procedures
without persons do not necessarily lead
to justice. Might one go so far as to recommend
to liberal theorists Edmund Burke,
whose own important understanding of prudence
as a political virtue is throughout a
rhetorical understanding? Someday, liberals
will recover Burke as one of their own, as
important to us as Mill. Be that as it may, the
art of rhetoric, properly understood, could
reconcile person and procedure by emphasizing
the judgment of audiences, the counsel
of rhetors, and the ethical and political association
of their mutual decisions.

Even so, Anderson’s paraphrases of the
positions of her contemporaries are always
clear and usually measured, including those
with whom she disagrees; she is usually a
model of ethical intellectual engagement and
a fine counter to the rhetoric of reductivism
that characterizes so much of our academic
discourse, and she deserves to improve its
conversation. And yet, having granted that
Anderson’s book, especially its third part, is
important, I still find myself perplexed by its
own avoidance of imaginative literature,
especially since imaginative literature has
quite a lot to say about the difficulties of
believing in freedom (think only of
Shakespeare’s Hamlet), in universalism
(Virgil’s Aeneid), and in reason (Dante’s
Paradiso). One brief exception proves the
rule when she discusses Toni Morrison’s
Beloved, and borrows heavily from work in
narrative and sympathy by Martha
Nussbaum, a philosopher whose literary understanding
is thoroughly Aristotelian; that
is, the only time a literary critic may now
discuss literature as such is when citing a
philosopher who does so.

Might the rhetorical “character” of literary
discussion be related to the poetic characters
within literature itself—until very recently
a taboo topic in literary studies? Someone
needs to tell the tale of English literature
professors who stopped talking about literature—
or, to put it more precisely, stopped
talking about literature in literary terms. I do
not have the space to do that here; I only note
that for at least thirty years Anglo-American
literary critics under the influence of contemporary
European philosophy, especially
in its deconstructionist and historicist forms,
have stopped teaching students how to read,
discuss, and write about imaginative literature
as such. I am all for historical awareness
and philosophical acumen, but literature is a
discipline, and historicists without history
and theorists without philosophy might want
to question their own academic authority. I
am all for interdisciplinary study, but
interdisciplinarity begins with discipline; and,
listening to literature professors in my professional
associations, I have begun to suspect
that some of us do not know what literature
is or how it works, and that some read
literature only to illustrate theoretical points
less sophisticated than literature itself. One of
the strange features of our strange critical age
is that those of us invested with the responsibility
of defending poetry in its quarrels with
both philosophy and history have simply
forfeited. The demands to theorize and
historicize might have very well allowed for
a refinement of the discipline; instead, they
overwhelmed it.

As a rhetorical analysis of contemporary
literary theory and as a thoughtful defense of
refined conceptions of freedom, universalism,
and reason, The Way We Argue Now is
quite good; and one hopes its academic
audience of literary theorists will be persuaded
not only by Anderson’s arguments,
but also by her example. Nevertheless, as an
instance of literary study at a time when
people, especially young people, read less and
less imaginative literature, the book gives me
pause. It is certainly true that my own
graduate school experience was frustrating
because it so often went without saying or
arguing that liberalism was craven and conservatism,
evil, but it was more frustrating
because we so seldom discussed literature as
such. If Anderson persuades literary theorists
to agree that we are free as human beings to
reason toward a better understanding of
things, perhaps the first topic of conversation
could be a literary one.