ABSTRACT
Who was Hugh Dalziel Duncan, and what is he doing with a chapter in The Prospect of Rhetoric? Moreover, why should we take the time to care about him or his paper, unimaginatively titled “The Need for Clarifi cation in Social Models of Rhetoric”? The title turns out to be misleading, and the chapter is far from the best in the book, but, as I’ve discovered, though he is largely unknown today, Hugh Duncan (1909-70) was a signifi cant and historically intriguing fi gure in rhetoric, communication, and cultural sociology. Duncan’s chapter serves as a thread end to a life that leads us well into the fabrics of rhetoric’s revival in the twentieth century.1 To follow that thread is to be led back to the social and intellectual places where rhetoric, communication, and culture developed as topics of conversation and intellectual inquiry, and begin to unravel details of larger tales not fully told. Duncan’s own contributions to these topics were impressive, but he operated at the margins of academic life, out of step with the institutional moment, and not well-placed within the structures of collective recognition and academic remembrance. His lifelong body of work is impressive, and well ahead of its day both in providing social and cultural accounts of rhetoric and drawing out constitutive dimensions of communication. He is a fi gure worth drawing back into the fi eld.
