The Recovery of Rhetoric: Persuasive Discourse and Disciplinarity in the Human Sciences

This collection of essays by distinguished international scholars from various disciplines addresses the widespread and growing interest in the nature and function of rhetoric, and in the rhetorical analysis of such human sciences as psychology, political science, economics, medicine, and philosophy.

The book may be situated with the new studies that show how disciplines have been constructed, legitimated, and institutionalised and, in particular, with those focusing on the material, social and rhetorical practices that have produced disciplinary knowledges and disciplines themselves. While the disciplines often present their knowledge as purely objective, their knowledges are, as the book shows, only available in rhetorical form. Rhetoric is thus not merely a medium through which knowledge is communicated but rather that which is constitutive of knowledge itself.

Richard H. Roberts is Director of the Institute for Religion and the Human Sciences at the University of St. Andrews. James M.M. Good is Co-Director of the Centre for the History of the Human Sciences at the University of Durham.