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4 - Debatable Land

Macaulay, Tocqueville, and the Art of Judgment

from PART II - Eloquence and the Moderns

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2021

Rob Goodman
Affiliation:
Ryerson University, Toronto
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Summary

Chapter 4 turns to the historiography of Thomas Babington Macaulay to investigate tensions between classical eloquence and the emergence of mass politics. Macaulay’s influential History of England revived the classical notion of history as a branch of rhetoric, as well as the classical practice of narrating political change through simulated speech. For Macaulay, writing history as rhetoric had a clear normative value: it was an effort to glamorize practices of political judgment that he saw as increasingly endangered by mass politics. While Macaulay contributed to the growth of political participation through his advocacy of the Reform Act, he also feared the ways in which mass politics might render political life less susceptible to classical norms of eloquence. His History is a response to this fear: an attempt to educate a judging public. The chapter concludes by contrasting his attempt with Tocqueville’s Ancien Régime. In comparison to his contemporary Macaulay, Tocqueville fixed his attention on secrecy rather than publicity, long-term processes rather than charged moments of persuasion, and tragic necessity rather than deliberative contingency. Nevertheless, Macaulay’s historiography offers something that Tocqueville’s lacks: a temporally sophisticated account of rhetoric, in which the orator’s responsibilities include cultivating practices of judgment over time.

Type
Chapter
Information
Words on Fire
Eloquence and Its Conditions
, pp. 118 - 157
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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  • Debatable Land
  • Rob Goodman, Ryerson University, Toronto
  • Book: Words on Fire
  • Online publication: 16 December 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009042840.008
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  • Debatable Land
  • Rob Goodman, Ryerson University, Toronto
  • Book: Words on Fire
  • Online publication: 16 December 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009042840.008
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Debatable Land
  • Rob Goodman, Ryerson University, Toronto
  • Book: Words on Fire
  • Online publication: 16 December 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009042840.008
Available formats
×