Orthodoxy and Enlightenment: George Campbell in the Eighteenth Century by Jeffrey M. Suderman

310 RHETORICA especially troubling for colonial discourse analysis, which is given a cursory treatment in Chapter Four but could have been developed in more depth and usefully applied in all of the examples. The last point draws attention to the fact that Schuetz does not develop an overarching thesis for her study in her brief introduction, and offers no separate conclusion. It is thus never clear what might hold these eleven very different chapters together beyond their interest as examples of governmentIndian relations or as examples of the diversity of rhetorical theories. The individual chapters consist mainly of summaries of the relevant history for the particular case study; surprisingly, there is little actual analysis. The conclusions to the individual chapters will likely seem obvious both to scholars actively engaged in American Indian studies and to American Indian peoples who live in the aftermath and ongoing legacies of these histories. The explanatory, theoretical, and activist potential of rhetorical analysis for these cases is left largely untapped. Chadwick Allen Ohio State University Jeffrey M. Suderman, Orthodoxy and Enlightenment: George Campbell in the Eighteenth Century. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001. 293 pages. Readers of Rhetorica are not the audience Jeffrey Suderman targeted in writing Orthodoxy and Enlightenment: George Campbell in the Eighteenth Century. Suderman writes that he was motivated to undertake this study to correct the imbalance of Campbell's modern reputation—as the author of the Philosophy of Rhetoric—and his contemporary reputation, which rested more on his Dissertation on Miracles and on his translation of the Gospels. Furthermore, Suderman claims that historians of the Enlightenment have devoted too much attention to atypical figures, especially skeptics such as Hume, Voltaire, and Gibbon, to the neglect of representative figures, such as Campbell. As a result, today Campbell is known "only to a few specialists" in rhetoric who read the Philosophy ofRhetoric "without a broader appreciation of his life and thought" (4-5). In contrast, Suderman would reconstruct the George Campbell that eighteenth-century audiences knew, and ... find what was representative in his thought" (6). To me, Suderman's seems a wrong-headed approach to Campbell, whose work (except for the Philosophy of Rhetoric) is as unremarkable as it is representative, but his perverse accounting of Campbell's achievement does not much compromise the usefulness of a book that is a model of a scholarship. Suderman divides his book into three parts: a biographical section (968 ); a section on the "Enlightened Campbell," which examines the origins of Campbell's thought in eighteenth century empiricism (69-178); and a section Reviews 311 on the "Religious Campbell," which examines Campbell as a biblical scholar and Christian polemicist. In appendices, Suderman lists all of Campbell's extant letters, each identified by library and manuscript number, and the manuscripts Suderman used in his study, some of which were not previously identified. Future Campbell scholars owe him thanks. The picture of Campbell that emerges from Suderman's biographical chapters is not substantially different from what we could piece together from Lloyd Bitzer's Introduction to his edition of the Philosophy of Rhetoric and from Lewis Ulman's work on the Aberdeen Philosophical Society. But Suderman adds more details to make this the most complete and reliable biography we have. Section II groups together the Philosophy of Rhetoric, the Dissertation on Miracles, and the Lectures on Ecclesiastical History as constituting Campbell's program to establish Christianity on rational grounds. Suderman therefore reads the Philosophy of Rhetoric in order to derive Campbell's philosophy of mind, concluding that Campbell's faculty of psychology and his discussion of evidence support the conclusion that belief in God and Christian morality can be rationally justified on empirical grounds. Scholars of rhetoric will find of particular interest Suderman's analysis of memory and his stress on the importance of the argument from design as the guarantor of the reliability of our reasoned conclusions. In Section III, "Revealed Knowledge: the Religious Campbell," Sud­ erman attempts to delineate Campbell's theology, discusses Campbell's en­ gagement with his Roman Catholic, Episcopalian, and Dissenting critics, and examines his translation of the Gospels. Suderman identifies Campbell's the­ ology as "mitigated" Calvinism (205). My conclusion...

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