Reviewed by: Adam Smith: The Rhetoric of Propriety Paul Turpin Adam Smith: The Rhetoric of Propriety. By Stephen J. McKenna . Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006; pp. 184. $22.95. Stephen J. McKenna has produced a solid study of the place of propriety in Adam Smith's rhetorical sensibilities, and in doing so he has contributed not only to the community of rhetorical scholars but also to the community of Adam Smith scholars. For rhetorical scholars, McKenna's work places Smith within a framework of efforts to rethink traditional approaches to rhetoric in the early modern era. There is a certain degree of antiquarian interest in being able to claim or reclaim Smith as a rhetorician, but the greater contribution is the connection that McKenna traces between the aesthetic and the ethical in Smith's thought that was a key question in the eighteenth century. The importance of the point is not the discovery of some heretofore unnoticed influence of Smith on the history of rhetoric, but rather to notice the influence of the history of rhetoric on Smith himself. McKenna argues that propriety was the architectonic concept of Smith's overarching intellectual interests, and one that had both aesthetic and moral implications based on the centrality of taking an audience's judgment into account. Homology, in the biological sciences, is similarity of form based on common descent, and that is exactly what McKenna argues Smith does with rhetoric and ethics. McKenna's contribution to the community of Adam Smith scholars is his close attention to Smith's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belle-Lettres (LRBL). Most Smith scholarship outside of the language arts pays little attention to this work. Of Smith's published works, Wealth of Nations remains his magnum opus, and his Theory of Moral Sentiments has generated interest largely on the [End Page 554] basis of its connection to Wealth of Nations. Of his unpublished work, however, the tendency has been to focus on Smith's Lectures on Jurisprudence with regard to moral questions and on his early essays with regard to his general intellectual orientation. McKenna's thesis, that LRBL's central focus on the relationship between style and propriety foreshadowed key psychological dynamics of social interaction that later formed the core of Theory of Moral Sentiments, places Smith's rhetorical thinking at the center of his intellectual development. The dynamic that connects the aesthetic to the moral is the process through which the character of the rhetor must come to grips with an audience. The need for suiting expression to audience is the communicative expression of attention to the reactions and judgments of others; in Theory of Moral Sentiments, it is the engine of moral discovery. Taste, in this view, is not merely solipsistic, nor is it merely conventional; rather, it is interactive in the sense that it guides a modification of the rhetor's own behavior for the sake of others. McKenna's book is a slender volume at 184 pages, but it is pithy. Chapter 1 sets out the general rhetorical problem of propriety—namely, how to specify its content without a complete reduction to conventionalism—and gives the reader an overview of the Scottish Enlightenment and Smith's life. Chapter 2 breaks new ground with an extended discussion of the classical rhetorical influences on Smith. Several recent works have done a similar task in tracing classical philosophical concepts in Smith's work, but McKenna's is the first I am aware of that does the same for rhetoric. Chapter 3 then broadens the scope to the background of propriety in the eighteenth century, with emphasis on the comparable dynamics of aesthetic and moral judgments to be found in a number of Smith's predecessors. Two key points emerge from this discussion: style imputes character, and taste implies an audience (71). This sets the stage for the remaining chapters of the book, which concentrate on Smith's ideas. Chapter 4 focuses on Smith's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres and is the heart of the news that McKenna has for us. Because this text was the product of student notes rather than Smith's own writing, textual analysis could be problematic...
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