ABSTRACT

A widely held view of the 18th-century Scottish rhetorics emphasizes their discontinuity with classical rhetoric. W. S. Howell's influential Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric, for example, states flatly that "British writers on rhetoric in the second half of the eighteenth century regarded Ciceronian rhetoric as an anachronism" (441) and goes on to articulate the idea of a "new rhetoric" rooted in philosophical empiricism and French belletrism. According to Howell's analysis, the new rhetoric is exemplified in the lectures and treatises of Adam Smith, George Campbell, David Hume, John Lawson, Joseph Priestley, Hugh Blair, and John Witherspoon. While recognizing that there are important differences among these writers and acknowledging that they drew in certain ways upon classical rhetoricians, Howell nonetheless sees them as unified in a "discordant consensus" that turned its back on the classical tradition.