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Skepticism and Political Thought in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries ed. by John Christian Laursen and Gianni Paganini (review)

The entire book has an inferential form. Henderson dives into specific texts and then offers the lessons that can be drawn from them in the first five chapters. The last two chapters include overall lessons illuminated by the foregoing analyses in considering the relationship between rhetoric, law, and philosophy (classical and postmodernist). One might quibble that Henderson’s generalizations about judicial rhetoric draw from a narrow range of cases – especially those involving rape and torts. To demonstrate the importance of narratives in, say, technical cases involving tax or contract law could reveal their importance in less obvious places. One also might wish that he grappled with cases where it is harder to take the moral high ground, as Henderson rightly does in denouncing patriarchal arguments in rape cases; to engage cases with less moral clarity might lead his analysis to grapple with the moral ambiguities that challenge judicial writers in many cases. What Henderson does offer here is one of the most sophisticated analyses of style and narrative in judicial rhetoric I have read. His is a noteworthy contribution to scholarship in rhetoric and law.