In the opening scene of the movie The Graduate a Mr. McGuire puts an avuncular arm around the Dustin Hoffman character and says, “I just want to say one word to you. Just one word.” Yes, sir? “Are you listening?” Yes, I am. “Plastics.” [Pause] Exactly how do you mean it? “There's a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?” Yes, I will. “Enough said: that's a deal.”

So nowadays the avuncular word to the wise is “rhetoric.” There's a great future in rhetoric. Furthermore, unlike plastics, rhetoric has also had a great past, the twenty centuries during which it was the educator of the young and the theory of speech in the West — as the classicist Werner Jaeger called it, “the first humanism,” the “rhetorical paideia.” The three and a half centuries of modernity since Bacon and Descartes have been in this respect an interlude. “We are still bemused,” notes Richard Lanham the historian of rhetoric, “by the 300 years of Great Newtonian Simplification which made ‘rhetoric’ a dirty word, but we are beginning to outgrow it” (forthcoming, ch. 2, p. 27; cf. Lanham 1992). British empiricism and French rationalism have had a long and glorious run.