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In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Aristotle’s Rhetoric: An Art of CharacterJohn T. KirbyEugene Garver. Aristotle’s Rhetoric: An Art of Character. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995. xii + 344 pp. Cloth, $53.95; paper, $18.95.The history of Aristotle’s Rhetoric has been one of cyclical obscurity and rediscovery. Arguably the single greatest work of rhetorical theory ever penned, in any time or culture, its popularity and influence seem to wax and wane repeatedly. Why this should be is not clear, but it is undeniable that even when it has not disappeared completely, its stock (so to speak) among theorists and practitioners of discourse has fluctuated.We are in a bull market for rhetorical studies generally, and these days Aristotle’s work (despite some dissenters who demonize him as the epitome of an oppressive ideology) is pretty much blue-chip. Even so, it is not every day that one encounters a book devoted entirely to the Rhetoric, and even less frequently is that book self-consciously written “philosophically.” In fact, in this century, the only other title in English that could be said to fit this description is Father William Grimaldi’s Studies in the Philosophy of Aristotle’s Rhetoric (Wiesbaden 1972), a book concerned with very different kinds of issues, for example, the unity (or otherwise) of the treatise overall, and its methodological relationship to the rest of the Aristotelian corpus. In a sense, then, Garver is quite justified in his claim that this is the first book-length treatment of Aristotle’s Rhetoric in this century (3). Moreover, it is a philosophical treatment in the sense that it endeavors to orient the Rhetoric (as its subtitle suggests) to issues of ethics, and because it considers the treatise as a work of political theory. Garver proposes that to call Aristotle’s treatise philosophical “is to insist, first of all, that the Rhetoric be read as a piece of philosophic inquiry, and judged by philosophic standards” (3, emphasis added): it is this aspect above all that distinguishes Garver’s approach from those, say, of the teacher of composition, who will be interested most in how the Rhetoric can best be used to teach principles of effective writing; of the historian of rhetoric, who will be interested in the vicissitudes of the Aristotelian system vis-à-vis those of competing schemata (such as, e.g., stasis theory); or of the classical philologist, into whose especial bailiwick fall such problems as those of Quellenforschung and Textgeschichte. Hence Garver’s explicit inattention to historicism in this work (“It contains virtually no examination [End Page 651] of the Rhetoric’s historical context,” 7). Which is not to say that Garver is ignorant of, or uninterested in, history: on the contrary, he reminds us that “The good practical use of reason has a history. The Greek word for the power of practical thinking is phronêsis; its Latin translation was prudentia” (5). And those who are familiar with Garver’s earlier work will know that he is the author of Machiavelli and the History of Prudence (Madison 1987). It is evident, then, that the study under review here is indeed (in a larger sense) a work of historical contextualization: another page in the history of phronêsis, as Aristotle used that term.Aristotle’s Rhetoric: An Art of Character is one of the most thoughtful studies of that brilliant and difficult treatise to emerge in a long time. Garver takes Aristotle seriously, posing pungent questions and answering them in original and interesting ways. His style is clean and occasionally arresting (“To us, Aristotle might look naive. To Aristotle, we would look not sophisticated but unnatural,” 10). And, in the course of the book, there emerges a portrait of the Rhetoric that quite confirms its philosophic nature—not, however, as a work of disembodied theôria, but one “designed... to present legislators with an understanding of the civic art of rhetoric” (245). While Garver feels that the treatise ‘is not very useful to practitioners of the art’ (245), Aristotle’s project is also described as a ‘civic, practical art of rhetoric’ (18). This brief statement requires a good deal of unpacking, because, on...