ABSTRACT
The publication of the fi rst edition of Michael Billig’s Arguing and Thinking (1987a) coincided with major conferences and publications on what have variously been called the “Rhetoric of Inquiry” movement, the “Rhetorical Turn” in the human sciences and the “Globalization” of rhetoric (Fish, 1989; Gergen, 1994; McCarthy, 1990; McCloskey, 1985; Nelson, Megill and McCloskey, 1987; Simons, 1989; 1990; 2004). By whatever name, this intellectual ferment bespoke a renaissance in the 2,500-year-old rhetorical tradition (Gergen, 1994, p. 40), a challenging of traditional philosophy’s objectivist and foundationalist presuppositions, a considerable widening beyond rhetoric’s traditional scope, and a coming together of disciplines in what anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1980, p. 165) called a “reconfi guration of thought about intellectual thought”.
