The Political Economy of Rhetorical Style: Hugh Blair's Response to the Civic-Commercial Dilemma

摘要

Recent scholarship treats Hugh Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783) as an effort to endorse either the liberal or the civic political traditions in eighteenth-century Scotland. This essay questions this orthodoxy by reading the Lectures, and in particular Blair's attention to considerations of rhetorical style, against their ideological and economic conditions and with a focus on how he seeks to adapt the civic political tradition of virtues—which today we might call the “bourgeois virtues”—to the emerging conditions of laissez-faire capitalism and the problem of excessive consumption in a growing commercial economy. Blair's appeal to a privatized cultural solution to the problems of economic excess presages similar efforts in contemporary times to negotiate the relationship between rhetoric and political economy under the conditions of late capitalism, and thus warrants renewed interest in his Lectures.