Sociology And Rhetoric: Some Personal Musings

Some thirty years ago I found myself starting graduate work in the Department of Sociology at The University of Wisconsin in Madison. This turned out not to have been a good choice. Despite being 31 years old, I was innocent of just how limited had been my exposure to mainstream sociology in my undergraduate years. I had thought that Marx, Weber, and Durkheim were the theorists who had set the ground rules for empirical inquiry, that people lived in groups according to the social meanings they created, that research would involve inquiry in such social groups and their cultural understandings. I was wrong: not at Madison. There, theory had to do with networks of logically connected syllogistic statements that had conclusions with observable consequences; people were individuals whose group life could be reconstructed from their responses to the questions of social surveys; the only valid information about social life had to be collected from randomly sampled individuals. And my task as a graduate student was to be trained into this mainstream. I took all the courses, wrote all the examinations, completed an MA and Ph.D., and still failed to be trained. And a major part of that failure was my discovery that rhetoric could save me. I had wanted to write my dissertation on Hugh Duncan, Kenneth Burke's greatest disciple, and felt it important to understand Burke and his place in rhetoric. Off I went to the Department of Communication Arts and, without knowing of their eminence, picked up on Ed Black and Lloyd Bitzer as my teachers.All this happened the year that the papers from the path-breaking 1970 Wingspread Conference were published as The Prospect of Rhetoric (Bitzer and Black, 1971). As these men taught it, rhetoric could save me from the narrow strictures of a poorly understood logical positivism that bound the ideology of my own department of sociology. The only problem that I had was that neither Bitzer nor Black could see this route to freedom that I wanted to follow!