REVIEWS
“Beautifully researched and written, The Weimar Origins of Rhetorical Inquiry provides major contributions to high modern intellectual history, political theory, and to the history and theory of rhetoric. I won’t be alone in seeing these neighboring fields differently after reading the book. At the same time the book speaks to a broader political culture: especially compelling is how Marshall provides a historically rich account of rhetorical possibility in para-democratic times.”
— Daniel M. Gross, University of California Irvine
“This is a wonderful, groundbreaking, and genuinely important book, one that won’t be read just in the next couple years, but one that will reward coming back to years from now. Not only is it brilliant in its depth of analysis and understanding of key figures, but it does hugely important work, carving out strong rhetorical content within what has heretofore been received as nearly exclusively philosophical or aesthetic work. The fact that Marshall does so with such rigor further backs the impact of his argument.”
— Thomas Rickert, Purdue University
“The Weimar Origins of Rhetorical Inquiry is as rewarding as it is ambitious. By relocating the rhetorical tradition within an intellectual topology of Heidegger, Arendt, Benjamin, and Warburg, the reader is brought to careful reconsideration of both modern and classical concepts. While erudite and bristling with insights, the book ultimately is a powerful study in method. All that remains is for other scholars to put it to work.”
— Robert Hariman, Northwestern University
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. The Weimar We Know and the Weimar We Do Not Know - David L. Marshall
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226722351.003.0001
[Weimar Republic;modern intellectual history;Robert Brandom;political theory;rhetoric;Max Weber;Carl Schmitt;Leo Strauss;Hans Baron;Theodor Adorno]
This first chapter of The Weimar Origins of Rhetorical Inquiry sets out the book’s basic problem. Scholars have recognized the importance of German intellectual culture forged in the context of the Weimar Republic between 1918 and 1933, and they have traced the impact of Weimar thinkers on a host of different disciplines. This is certainly true in political theory, so much so that one can even reconstruct something like a “standard received version” of Weimar political thought and its influence. Partly as a result of repetition, it is more difficult now to narrate this standard received version with conviction and subtlety. Weimar Origins begins with an alternative hypothesis. We can rejuvenate these narratives of disciplinary origin by foregrounding an intellectual tradition that scholars of Weimar have passed over almost in silence: rhetoric. The introduction demonstrates this point by using rhetoric to redescribe an inquiry sequence running through Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, Hans Baron, and Theodor Adorno. Drawing on the philosophical work of Robert Brandom, the chapter lays out an account of intellectual history that guides its bid to demonstrate that a new history of Weimar ideas may legitimately open up fresh lines of inquiry today. (pages 1 - 44)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
2. Idioms of Rhetorical Inquiry - David L. Marshall
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226722351.003.0002
[modern intellectual history;rhetoric;Quentin Skinner;Robert Brandom;Immanuel Kant;Friedrich Nietzsche;Wilhelm Dilthey;Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten]
The Weimar Origins of Rhetorical Inquiry shows how we can re-read German intellectual culture between 1918 and 1933 when we have a rich sense of a tradition of thought that scholars of the Weimar Republic have passed over almost in silence—namely, rhetoric. That rhetorical tradition is variously Sicilian, Athenian, Hellenic, Roman, Christian, Arab, Medieval, Byzantine, and Renaissance in its provenance (to name only some of the stations of its itinerary), and Weimar Origins lays out German receptions of this tradition since approximately 1650. This second contextual chapter organizes those various receptions under five headings: what rhetoric is; the place of the art of topics within that broader tradition; rhetoric’s attention to historical specifications of time and place; the continent of thoughts embedded in rhetoric’s account of the tropes; and the variety of orientations to belief that rhetoric describes. The chapter both establishes receptions of rhetoric as a series of intellectual contexts and aims at creating a reader for the book who is skilled at seeing and drawing inferences within the array of sentences structuring the tradition. (pages 45 - 85)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
3. Heideggerian Foundations - David L. Marshall
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226722351.003.0003
[modern intellectual history;Martin Heidegger;rhetoric;philosophy;modality;actuality;possibility;everydayness]
The Weimar Origins of Rhetorical Inquiry shows how we can re-read German intellectual culture between 1918 and 1933 when we have a rich sense of a tradition of thought that scholars of the Weimar Republic have passed over almost in silence—namely, rhetoric. This third chapter of Weimar Origins takes up the foundational case of Martin Heidegger. With the appearance of a great deal of new material in the Heidegger Gesamtausgabe (which lays out a deeply problematic but extremely rich cache of sources) and with the publication of many of his lectures in the 1920s, scholars have begun to realize that Heidegger engaged with rhetoric at a formative stage in the development of Being and Time. This is particularly true of the 1924 Summer Semester lectures that Heidegger gave at the University of Marburg. This chapter treats these lectures as pivotal and takes up the challenge of reinterpreting the entirety of the Heideggerian corpus while treating 1924 as the zero-hour. What emerges is a profound, provocative, and profoundly abstract engagement with modality in which rhetoric emerges as the core hermeneutic of not only the everyday but also the possible and the actual (or actualizing). (pages 86 - 126)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
4. Hannah Arendt and the Rhetorical Constitution of Space - David L. Marshall
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226722351.003.0004
[modern intellectual history;Hannah Arendt;rhetoric;political theory;Augustine;Rahel Varnhagen;polis;space of appearance]
The Weimar Origins of Rhetorical Inquiry shows how we can re-read German intellectual culture between 1918 and 1933 when we have a rich sense of a tradition of thought that scholars of the Weimar Republic have passed over almost in silence—namely, rhetoric. This fourth chapter of Weimar Origins takes up the case of Hannah Arendt, and it re-reads the Arendtian oeuvre by focusing on the early texts: her 1929 dissertation on the concept of love in Augustine; her literary biography of the early nineteenth-century Jewish salonnière Rahel Varnhagen (completed in the 1930s but not published until 1958); and her shorter more occasional political writings up to the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951. By bringing an awareness of rhetoric to these earlier materials, we are able to grasp new truths about Arendt’s work. The chapter argues that, in fact, these earlier materials constitute a more arresting formulation of ideas that are thought to have received their canonical expression in her later thought—with particular emphasis on such ideas as the polis and the space of appearance. (pages 127 - 164)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
5. Walter Benjamin and the Rhetorical Construal of Indecision - David L. Marshall
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226722351.003.0005
[modern intellectual history;Walter Benjamin;Carl Schmitt;rhetoric;literary theory;Trauerspiel;invention;improvisation;radio plays;pedagogy]
The Weimar Origins of Rhetorical Inquiry shows how we can re-read German intellectual culture between 1918 and 1933 when we have a rich sense of a tradition of thought that scholars of the Weimar Republic have passed over almost in silence—namely, rhetoric. This fifth chapter of Weimar Origins takes up the case of Walter Benjamin. The chapter begins with a re-reading of his work on the origins of German tragic drama (Trauerspiel). So rich is Benjamin’s inheritance of Baroque inflections of the rhetorical tradition, that one can organize an analysis of the Trauerspiel book via the five constituent parts of classical rhetoric—namely, invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. It emerges that one of the red threads running through Benjamin’s work is the development of a capacity for political action that turns on an ability to invent in the context of indecision. This ability is illuminated by an understanding of rhetoric, and it is continually re-written throughout Benjamin’s oeuvre: in the radio plays, in his accounts of pedagogy, in his engagements with modern theater, and in a thousand other locales. The chapter shows that Benjamin articulates a kind of rhetorical indecisionism. (pages 165 - 205)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
6. Warburgian Image Practices - David L. Marshall
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226722351.003.0006
[modern intellectual history;Aby Warburg;rhetoric;history of art;art theory;astrology;image atlas;restitutio eloquentiae;magnanimity]
The Weimar Origins of Rhetorical Inquiry shows how we can re-read German intellectual culture between 1918 and 1933 when we have a rich sense of a tradition of thought that scholars of the Weimar Republic have passed over almost in silence—namely, rhetoric. This sixth chapter of Weimar Origins takes up the case of Aby Warburg. Warburg has been an absolutely foundational figure in the history and theory of art as well as Renaissance Studies, but this chapter begins with his consideration of restitutio eloquentiae as the title of his great unfinished masterwork, which has come to be known as the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne (“the Mnemosyne Image Atlas”). The chapter establishes intellectual contexts and ideas around Warburg’s Luther essay of 1919 and his discourse on the Pueblo Indians of 1923, in order to make sense of manuscript sources that shed further light on the senses in which the image atlas was a “restitution of eloquence.” Among other things, Warburg indicated in those notes that an account of Magnanimitas (magnanimity) was embedded in this “restitution.” By offering a detailed reconstruction of the Warburgian inquiry sequence, the chapter makes it possible to read this gambit as implying a new rhetorical theory of freedom. (pages 206 - 251)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
7. New Points of Departure in the Weimar Afterlife - David L. Marshall
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226722351.003.0007
[modern intellectual history;rhetoric;Hans-Georg Gadamer;Klaus Dockhorn;Hans Blumenberg;Erwin Panofsky;Giorgio Agamben;Ernesto Grassi;Helene Weiss;Peter Sloterdijk]
The Weimar Origins of Rhetorical Inquiry shows how we can re-read German intellectual culture between 1918 and 1933 when we have a rich sense of a tradition of thought that scholars of the Weimar Republic have passed over almost in silence—namely, rhetoric. Following readings of Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, and Aby Warburg in the four previous chapters, this seventh chapter of Weimar Origins traces the afterlives of these intellectual initiatives in post-1933 and post-1945 contexts. Buttressed by a reading of the philosophical work of Robert Brandom, the book makes a case for what it calls “inferentialist intellectual history,” and this chapter pursues the point by forging a tradition out of the miscellany of intellectual materials selected by two criteria—post-Weimar German thinkers demonstrably engaging with both rhetoric, on the one hand, and with Heidegger, Arendt, Benjamin, and/or Warburg, on the other. The chapter traces the fortune of four intellectual topoi: indecisionism; judgment; everydayness; and what it calls “topical practices.” (pages 252 - 295)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
8. The Possibilities Now - David L. Marshall
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226722351.003.0008
[modern intellectual history;rhetoric;philosophy of history;computation]
The Weimar Origins of Rhetorical Inquiry shows how we can re-read German intellectual culture between 1918 and 1933 when we have a rich sense of a tradition of thought that scholars of the Weimar Republic have passed over almost in silence—namely, rhetoric. Following readings of Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, and Aby Warburg in the four core chapters of the book, this eighth and final chapter of Weimar Origins returns to the assertion made at the beginning of the book: it is both possible and legitimate to articulate an account of rhetorical inquiry out of a tradition that we can “invent” in Weimar and its various intellectual historical afterlives. On the basis of an argument for an inferentialist intellectual history drawing on the philosophical work of Robert Brandom, this final chapter sets out an account of Weimar rhetorical inquiry that responds to the contexts that are emerging in the twenty-first century. In particular, the chapter makes a case for the continued richness of the tradition precipitated in Weimar for thinking about issues of possibility notwithstanding the fact that the rise of computational approaches to statistics has transformed “possibility” radically. (pages 296 - 328)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
