Between Structure and Struggle:The Intellectual Legacy of James Arnt Aune John M. Murphy (bio) In conversation and publication, Jim Aune often justified the practices of public advocacy and rhetorical criticism through the words of John Dewey: "The essential need, in other words, is the improvement of the methods and conditions of debate, discussion, and persuasion. That is the problem of the public."1 Both parts of that task meant much to Aune. Like him, many of us have spent our careers teaching and studying the available means of persuasion, but he also focused his formidable intelligence on those conditions. What enables and constrains public discussion? What happens when we substitute culture for society, measurement for judgment, science for rhetoric? Who, in fact, is this "we" of which I speak? Jim pursued such questions with relentless energy. His answers comforted the afflicted and afflicted the comfortable. It is this intellectual legacy I wish to pursue in this short essay. I begin with rhetoric's rhetorical problem. I use that language with some care because it infused Aune's work. He began with the assumption that all was not right with the world. The "depredations wrought by the latest incarnation of the free market—that is, globalized laissez-faire capitalism" were objects of scorn in his last book, and his goal, also expressed in that book, was to overcome "the recent fragmentation of left-leaning coalitions" so that they might join to make of this nation a just society.2 To that end, he dove into contemporary social theories because he thought they offered a useful way to frame and address those issues. If ink expended is any clue, he [End Page 567] concluded that Marxism to a greater extent and liberalism to a lesser extent offered the most practical means with which to subvert libertarian and free market discourses and, in turn, find ways to increase human happiness. Yet both Marxism and liberalism shared a rhetorical problem. Early in Rhetoric & Marxism, he noted, "Marxism, like liberalism, participated in the Enlightenment project of eliminating mystification from social life—and this undertaking required a commitment to a perfectly transparent language."3 It did so because modernity sought to establish, above all else, the autonomy of the individual. Drawing on philosopher Robert Pippin and others, Aune often told the story of rhetoric's decline.4 In a study of Thomas Farrell's Norms of Rhetorical Culture, for instance, he traced the social and economic reasons for that fall, including the ascent of capitalism and modern science, the evolution of the specialized languages of public policy and public relations, as well as the development of new forms of class stratification that meant "public communicators addressed increasingly fragmented audiences more inclined to participate in public life or vote on the basis of group economic interests than on reasoned deliberation mediated by the great orator-statesmen."5 Yet social and economic forces were not the whole story: "The very philosophy of liberal democracy itself was based on a fundamental distrust of persuasion. Once the autonomous individual rather than the family or community became the fundamental building block of politics, any effort to subvert that autonomy, whether through rhetoric or violence, came to be viewed as a 'heteronomous imposition,' as Immanuel Kant put it." Any normal adult, he argued, possessed the capacity for self-government: "'No authority external to ourselves is needed to constitute or inform us of the demands of morality. We can each know without being told what we ought to do because moral requirements are requirements we impose on ourselves.'"6 Any effort to persuade another person was, ipso facto, a desire to move someone away from plainly clear, internally revealed universal moral law. That was obviously unethical. All people required of language was the plain clarity with which to articulate self-evident truth. Transparency was the order of the day.7 As liberalism's companion on the Enlightenment journey, Marxism came to share this rhetorical incapacity. At the end of a lovely summary of Marxism's assumptions, Aune claimed, "Marxism has two rhetorical problems." First, if its triumph was inevitable, why should people risk their [End Page 568] lives in support of its...