Examines the place of rhetoric in John Locke's political and philosophical thought. Traces the close ties between rhetoric and experience as they form the basis for a theory and practice of judgment at the center of his work"--Provided by publisher.

This essay examines John Locke’s engagement with monsters as a question of toleration in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Recounting a monster’s birth as a case of uncertain identity, Locke endorses a provisional form of judgment. I compare this response with Michel de Montaigne’s treatment of monsters in his Essays in order to highlight a politics of imagination and reason relevant to political judgment and toleration. Montaigne alerts us to significant silences in Locke’s treatment of monsters that reveal unrecognized dimensions (...) of his tolerationist position in the Essay. The provisional judgment forwarded by each thinker resituates toleration from epistemological questions of identity toward various practices of acknowledgment as theorized by Stanley Cavell. Some of these practices of acknowledgement, I contend, are better suited to the conditions of democratic membership. (shrink)

This essay considers self-ownership as a rhetorical and political practice. Scholarly attention to the rhetoric of self-ownership, notably in feminist theory, often rejects the term for its capacity to distort and fragment notions of the self, the body, social relations, and labor. The ambiguous character of self-ownership, in this view, carries the risk of subversion of more inclusive and relational uses. Adopting a broader notion of rhetoric as creative and effective speech, I recast self-ownership from this critical depiction through a (...) revised understanding of C. B. Macpherson’s possessive individualism and then to the texts of John Locke, the Levellers, and the Putney Debates. These early-modern exemplars offer insights into the political promises and risks of the rhetoric of self-ownership that contemporary critics obscure. The ambiguity and plurality too often rendered as a liability for self-ownership instead offer conditions for its agonistic invocation for novel claims and emerging audiences. (shrink)