No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 December 2008
Over the past decade, William Riker has written a series of articles that reinterpret the founding of American politics in light of insights gleaned from theories of rational choice. In the course of these efforts, he has invented a new subject, “heresthetics,” having “to do with the manipulation of the structure of tastes and alternatives within which decisions are made.” With Evelyn C. Fink, for example, he has shown more systematically than previous analyses how the federalists structured the the ratification process by attaching an informal promise of future amendment to a formally unconditional ratification. In the present essay, Riker moves from heresthetics to rhetoric: “Rhetoric and heresthetic are both techniques of winning. But they are different kinds of techniques. Rhetoric is persuasion.… With heresthetic, on the other hand, conviction is at best secondary or not involved at all.” Riker describes federalist and antifederalist ratification rhetoric in an effort to display the persuasiveness of “negative” campaign appeals for those who wish to attract the support of marginal voters.
1. Riker, William H., “Political Theory and the Art of Heresthetics,” in Political Science: The State of the Discipline, ed. Finifter, Ada W. (Washington, D.C.: American Political Science Association, 1983), p. 55Google Scholar.
2. Fink, Evelyn C. and Riker, William H., “The Strategy of Ratification,” in The Federalist Papers and the New Institutionalism, ed. Groffman, Bernard and Wittman, Donald (New York: Agathon, 1989), pp. 220–54Google Scholar. See also Riker, William H., “The Heresthetics of Constitution-making: the Presidency in 1787, with Comments on Determinism and Rational Choice,” American Political Science Review 78 (03 1984): 1–16Google Scholar.
3. Riker, “Political Theory and the Art of Heresthetics,”, p. 60.
4. Russell Hardin has argued that several standard concepts in game theory are not apt for a “game” that establishes the games, in “Why a Constitution,” The Federalist Papers and the New Institutionalism, pp. 100–120. See also Ackerman, Bruce, “Constitutional Politics/Constitutional Law,” Yale Law Journal 99 (12 1989): 453–547Google Scholar; and Holmes, Stephen, “The Secret History of Self-Interest,” in Beyond Self-Interest, ed. Mansbridge, Jane J. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 267–86Google Scholar.
5. A recent collection bringing together historical research to document the great differences among campaigns state to state is Gillespie, Michael Allen and Lienesch, Michael, eds., Ratifying the Constitution (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1989)Google Scholar.
6. One of the merits of Riker's studies is that they are premised on a suitably nuanced understanding of “winning.” However, he tends to confine the persuasive power of rhetoric to the tasks of winning citizen votes for delegates, while other aspects of “winning” are treated as “heresthetical,” not rhetorical, problems.
7. See Jean Yarbrough, “New Hampshire: Puritanism and the Moral Foundations of America,” in Gillespie and Lienesch, Ratifying, pp. 235–60. It is, of course, difficult to ascertain the extent to which the same rhetoric that elected the delegates altered their supposed views, and the extent to which that rhetoric provided partisans direction for subsequent argument.
8. Another consequence of this assumption about partisans is to render problematic Riker's promise of a science suitable for giving political advice, since politicians already adopt the best strategy. They don't need advice.
9. “It is hardly too much to say that among the ‘front line’ debaters the Antifederalists criticized the Constitution and the Federalists criticized the Antifederalists” (Storing, Herbert J., “The ‘Other’ Federalist Papers: A Preliminary Sketch,” The Political Science Reviewer 6 [Fall 1976]: 215–48Google Scholar). Riker restates the pattern of rhetoric as follows: “[the] Federalists were campaigning against the crisis of the status quo, while the Antifederalists were campaigning against the reforms the Federalists offered” (p. 246). It is an odd locution indeed that a diagnosis of a political crisis should be regarded as an argument “against the crisis.” It should also be noted that Riker wrongly states that there does not exist a survey of federalist writings generally, similar to the accounts he cites of antifederalist writings.
10. Riker misunderstands Storing on this issue. Storing argues that consolidation was more “fundamental” to the antifederalist case even if particular threats to liberty were more typically expressed by them, because consolidation was the root threat to liberty. Riker interprets this to mean that Storing offers an account of what was in partisan minds, whereas Riker confined himself to what they actually said: “Neither [Main and Storing] not I can read the minds of eighteenth century men” (p. 250). But Storing doesn't seek to read minds. He seeks to identify those few writings that see things “farther and better.” Riker quotes this passage from Storing, but misses its point.
11. On this point, see Norton, Anne, Reflections on Political Identity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988)Google Scholar. Norton argues that meaning is created in difference, “in the designation of what a thing is not” (p. 3).
12. The attribution of the federalists' loss to the quality of federalist rhetoric is in Storing, Herbert J., What the Anti-Federalists Were For (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 71Google Scholar. Compare Hemberger, Suzette, “Dead Stepfathers,” Northwestern University Law Review 84 (Fall 1989): 225Google Scholar.
13. Compare Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1382a20 to 1383b11.
14. The objective stakes may or may not have been those alleged by the rhetoricians. Still, the claims of the partisans do not seem to me as fantastic they do to Riker (p. 268). The antifederalist prediction regarding threats to liberty is not disproved by hindsight, as Riker argues, because the Constitution with a Bill of Rights appended is not the one they so ardently opposed. And the federalists' fears of untoward consequences that would have followed from a failure to consolidate can't be dismissed with the observation that the antifederalists would have adopted modest reforms. The key to the federalist case was that there is no defensible middle ground between confederation and a consolidation marked by an unmediated relation of citizen and federal state. The federalists may have been wrong, of course, but their claim is plausible.
15. Michael Gillespie and Michael Lienesch argue that the federalists' strident newspaper campaign in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and New York hurt their cause, “in fact almost snatched defeat from the jaws of victory and came close to assuring the rejection of the proposed plan” (Gillespie and Lienesch, Ratifying, Introduction, p. 18).
16. Nelson, John S., Megill, Allan, and McCloskey, Donald N., eds. The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Gross, Alan G., The Rhetoric of Science (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; and McCloskey, Donald N., The Rhetoric of Economics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985)Google Scholar.
17. “A rhetorical criticism…might make economists more self aware, modest and tolerant” (McCloskey, Rhetoric, pp. 174–75).
18. Ibid., pp. 4–5.
19. For example, Aristotle.