This edited volume of eleven chapters draws from sources as diverse as Thucydides, Plato, Cicero, St. Augustine, John of Salisbury, Christine de Pizan, and John Stuart Mill. On the one hand, the volume is intended as a selective but wide-ranging study of the history of the theory and practice of rhetoric. As the editors Benedetto Fontana, Cary J. Nederman, and Gary Remer stress in the Introduction, the essays are “committed to a historical analysis of their subject matter” (p. 20). But the volume is much more than an exercise in historical analysis or an intellectual history of theoretical reflections on rhetoric. The essays are drawn together into a genuine whole by an argument that runs throughout the book.

The argument of Talking Democracy is first presented in the extensive Introduction, in which the editors prepare the way by discussing the rise of deliberative democracy within democratic theory. They are in some sympathy with the aims of deliberative democrats, such as Joshua Cohen, Seyla Benhabib, Amy Gutmann, and Dennis Thompson, who, like their civic republican counterparts, are seeking “to recover the original and more profound sense of political activity, as something that transcends the immediately private and economic” (p. 5). Yet while the editors are impressed by the originating impulse behind the movement toward a more deliberative model of democracy, they present their volume as a critique of deliberative democracy. Their quarrel with the deliberative democrats is in part a historical one. Contrary to the deliberative democrats' dismissal of classical and medieval forms of political activity as irrelevant to contemporary notions of public deliberation—a dismissal that has its roots in Jürgen Habermas's argument about the transformation of the public sphere in the modern era—the editors and other contributors want to rehabilitate premodern models by arguing that important and vital forms of deliberation can be discovered in at least some premodern polities. The richness and relevance of premodern theory and practice has been obscured, they argue, by the deliberative democrats' overly restrictive notions of what should count as legitimate public speech. This historical line of argument, however, is meant not merely to correct a deficiency in the historical analysis of the deliberative democrats but also to open up a broader line of criticism. The deeper argument of the book is that a reconsideration of the history of the theory and practice of rhetoric as a vital form of public speech can lead to an understanding of democratic activity that is more complex, more vibrant, and more realistic than the “desiccated, abstract model of democracy” produced by the idealistic and overly rationalistic demands of the deliberative democrats (p. 18).

The critique of deliberative democracy running throughout the book has a political dimension and an epistemological dimension. As a challenge to the vision of politics presented by deliberative democracy, the contributors raise the question: To what extent can power, interest, and irrational passions really be overcome by open discourse? And on the epistemological level, they raise the question: Is it realistic to expect, or even to hope, that the conclusions reached by public deliberation could ever be unblemished products of fully transparent and rational processes? In posing these questions, the contributors are careful to avoid the stance of premodern and postmodern cynics who would argue that politics will always reduce to power and the techniques used to disguise it—to mere force and fraud. Instead, they want to find a middle path that is appreciative of the messy business that democratic deliberation really is, even or precisely when it is conducted through public speech. They argue that democratic deliberation, as it actually operates and especially when it involves rhetoric, is deeply flawed but not without its own dignity. If such deliberation does not arrive at perfect clarity because it must reach decisions based on sketchy information provided by biased sources, that is both its vice and its virtue, since it calls on citizens to exercise a kind of judgment that resembles the sifting activity of a historian like Thucydides, as Arlene Saxonhouse argues in her chapter, “Democratic Deliberation and the Historian's Trade.” And if it must be acknowledged that public speech, which is rhetoric more often than “pure speech,” appeals not just to reason but to a whole range of complex human emotions and passions, that means that to understand democratic politics, we need a rich moral psychology, such as the one Russell Bentley finds in Aristotle's Rhetoric in his chapter, “Rhetorical Democracy.”

In addition to presenting a realistic and multifaceted portrait of democratic deliberation, the book also recovers and explores the troubling moral questions surrounding the use of rhetoric. Precisely because premodern authors took rhetoric so seriously, they had to confront the charges that can be leveled against rhetoric. The two charges that most concern the contributors to Talking Democracy are the charge of elitism and the charge of manipulative deception. In short, does the art of rhetoric give the speaker an illegitimate source of power that violates the democratic principle of equality? And does not rhetoric often violate the moral principles of openness and honesty? These vexing questions run throughout many of the chapters, especially the one on Cicero by Remer and the fascinating chapter on John of Salisbury and Christine de Pizan by Nederman and Tsae Lan Lee Dow. Broadly speaking, on these moral issues, the contributors are again seeking to find a middle path—in this case, a path between an unrealistic and naive insistence on perfect equality and transparency, and an unprincipled slide into a Machiavellian acceptance of all forms of deception and manipulation.

This is an excellent volume, not only because the essays recover forgotten sources of profound reflection on rhetoric and the true nature of democratic deliberation, but also because the contributors display a remarkable flexibility in bringing historical perspectives to bear on contemporary issues. Perhaps the greatest virtue of this volume is the service it does in bridging the divide within political theory between the study of the history of political thought and contemporary attempts to construct new theoretical models. The contributors have not merely argued that even premodern sources can shed light on questions central to political theory today—they have demonstrated it.