Farnsworth’s Classical English Argument

By Ward Farnsworth

Godine 2024

We live in a moment of exceptional interpersonal stupidity and ferocity. Driven by social media and encouraged by the revival of fascism, public discourse is increasingly characterized by screaming, feces-throwing, and shrill imbecility. And since all declining societies crave the very rules they’re abandoning, life guides and prescriptive manuals (rules for life as an antidote to chaos, as it were) proliferate. 

Boston’s Godine publisher learned something of this back in 2010 when they had a small hit with a book called Farnsworth’s Classical English Rhetoric, which was followed by Farnsworth Classical English Metaphor and Farnsworth’s Classical English Style, and now the latest and most obviously hopeless installment, Farnsworth’s Classical English Argument, which follows the pattern of the series by presenting the basics of argument (the “English” refers mostly to the language, not England itself) illustrated by excerpts from a wide variety of public speeches made a century or more ago. The time gap is pointed, as readers are told:

The writers and speakers we’ll examine were able to disagree about important things without the quick descent into savagery or imbecility that has become so familiar. They were invested in good manners to an extent that can seem strange to modern ears; they were protective of the dignity of their enterprise and the parties to it. But that’s not to say they were gentler. Those customs sometimes let them vilify each other with more zing than is common now while debasing themselves less.

Famous names crop up often in these pages, well-known figures like Thomas Macaulay, John Stuart Mill, Arthur Balfour, Thomas Paine, or Benjamin Disraeli. But there are plenty of long-forgotten lawmakers quoted as well, all in an attempt to flesh out such argument tactics as irony or carefully controlled outrage or, in a Senate speech from 1892, the gesture of falsely broad candor that’s also ruefully familiar in the present moment: “Let us be frank with each other. If we propose to trample down the rule in order to do what we want to do, let us do it, but do not let us do it under the miserable pretense that we are observing the rule, for we are doing nothing of the kind.”

The book is elegantly turned out although perhaps too cursory, and, perhaps predictably, its most interesting segments deal with tricks and fallacies like the “motte and bailey” bait-and-switch: 

This pattern isn’t always a fallacy, but it’s a type of misbehavior in argument that is best treated here because it sometimes involves equivocation. You take provocative position X. Then when the position is challenged, you say that you merely meant Y – something less controversial than X and easier to defend … The effect is to rile people up with an unsound claim while avoiding accountability for it.

21st-century readers finishing Farnsworth’s Classical English Argument will probably feel a reflexive urge to cancel someone, firebomb the Godine offices, and perhaps murder a few passersby, but this is merely the mania of the moment and should be resisted. In fact, that mania would be considerably lessened if the present conception of argument could be decoupled from personal and professional annihilation. Maybe this book can help.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News