Goodman's is a thoughtful discussion of the importance of eloquence, or “skilled speech” (10), for politics. He offers nuanced portrayals of Cicero, Burke, Macaulay, and others wrestling with the possibilities of eloquence under changing circumstances. Most of the subjects of these chapters were themselves involved in politics—and hence were reflecting on and honing their own rhetorical practice as much as contributing to rhetorical theory. Goodman insists on the importance of rhetoric's “stylistic abundance”—“a quality of language in excess of argument” (13).

Seeing Like an Activist is a profound—and profoundly political—book. Skillfully distilling complex historical evidence into a vivid narrative and advancing a compelling theoretical argument, Pineda unsettles conventional accounts of the civil rights movement to ask what we can learn about the nature and limits of civil disobedience “by reconsidering the example we already think we know so well” (3). One of the book's key contributions is its analysis of political practices that constituted the “short civil rights movement”—the decade of southern protest bookended by the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955–56 and the Selma March in 1965. “The civil rights movement (and its multitude of activists),” Pineda observes, “operates between the lines of theory as an object lesson—a ready-made example that proves the moral purchase of the theory, rather than a live source of novel theoretical insights and political claims” (48). As object lesson, the movement is often recruited to police or criticize forms of protest that are said to fall short of the disciplined nonviolence of the past. This view of history, Pineda contends, enables theorists of civil disobedience like John Rawls to use the example of civil rights activism to affirm the liberal constitutional order. Offering incisive critiques of Rawls, Michael Walzer, and Hugo Bedau, Pineda exposes the unearned ease with which political theories that do not take racial injustice as a central concern or focus on Black theoretical practices have conscripted the civil rights movement in service of their arguments.

In his encyclopedic masterwork Li livres dou Tresor (The Books of Treasure), the mid-thirteenth-century Florentine civil servant and rhetorician Brunetto Latini proclaimed “the very wise Marcus Tullius Cicero” to be “the finest orator in the world and the master of rhetoric.”1 How might this remark by a medieval professional civic administrator (even one with pronounced Ciceronian proclivities) pertain to Goodman's book? I take as my inspiration for the ensuing comments Latini's phrase in Tresor—“The very wise Marcus Tullius Cicero”—in relation to the final word of Goodman's subtitle: “Conditions.” As I began to peruse Words on Fire, I expected to encounter discussion of “wisdom” and of related ideas such as “reason,” “natural law,” and “justice” rather often. After all, these factors constitute indispensable features of Cicero's political theory. I was thus greatly surprised to discover that Goodman mentions them only belatedly and briefly (65–66).

Michel Foucault once wrote, “Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable. It is the connection of desire to reality (and not its retreat into the forms of representation) that possesses revolutionary force.”1 This affect of revolutionary force stems from the joyful militancy of bringing into existence the already possibly present worlds that are assumed to be impossible.2

Goodman defends that most maligned aspect of the rhetorical tradition: eloquence. Surely, one would think that eloquence, by its very nature, speaks for itself and quite effectively so, with all the pleasing and persuasive effects of a grand style. Perhaps popular audiences are easily carried along by decorous speech, but Goodman addresses his defense to theorists of politics who tend to greet obvious rhetorical flourish with a deep suspicion of manipulation and deception, or at least of frivolity. On this view, the best thing that can be said about eloquence in its classical form is that it poses no serious threat since the modern advent of mass society and large-scale democracy marks its demise. Goodman forces readers to reconsider the story of the rhetorical tradition's elitist, manipulative, and obsolete character through an engaging, nuanced, and unexpected retelling of Ciceronean eloquence as a tradition that spans the ancient and modern world, one that survives and responds to the challenges of democratic judgment in large polities. Goodman's compelling and insightful book poses an important challenge to theorists of democracy, both contemporary and historical, to take eloquence seriously as an invitation to democratic judgment.

Pineda's book is an original and imaginative reconstruction of activist strategy and political theory, upending the orthodox account of civil disobedience during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Against liberal and democratic theorists who domesticate civil disobedience in the United States, with the aim of legitimizing the nation's constitutional democracy as “nearly just,” or in need of reform rather than revolution, Pineda argues that civil rights activists “theorized and deployed” civil disobedience as “decolonizing praxis” (16). She traces the decades-long history in which Black activists in the United States crafted their strategy of civil disobedience through embodied spaces, relationships, and practices of “imaginative transit” with revolutionaries in India, South Africa, and Ghana. These networks of transit enabled activists to diagnose segregation and colonialism as sites of a “shared, global condition” (59) of white supremacy, “operating with a common, reinforcing logic” of economic, political, and psychological domination (89). As a decolonizing praxis, civil disobedience combined an “inward-facing politics” of self-emancipation with an “outward-facing politics” (16) of disruption and disclosure—aimed not at reforming aberrations in constitutional democracy, but at “transforming the psychological, structural, and relational bases of white supremacy” (59).

A “reckoning” is an opportunity to settle a score. It is a moment of collision between what is and what is due. Woodly's excellent book not only espouses the formation and political organization of the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) coalition, but it also describes how social movements challenge the status quo and demand transformation in light of systems that work only for the powerful few. This transformation, Woodly shows, is brought about by the grassroots theorizing and political praxis of social movement organizers. Reckoning models the development of these new ideas, demonstrating both their intellectual and practical legacies. In this essay, I consider Woodly's theoretical formulation of the M4BL's philosophy of “radical Black feminist pragmatism” and what I see are (1) its promise for centering the reorienting practices of radical Black feminist politics and (2) the ways “pragmatism” as a frame stands in tension with those radical elements of the movement.

Nearly all twenty-first-century readers of St. Augustine of Hippo become interested in him after reading the story of his Confessions. Yet when nonspecialists want to read more of him, they are directed to the later and more magisterial writings whose author is not immediately recognizable as the young searcher from the Confessions: City of God, On The Trinity, On Christian Doctrine, the scriptural commentaries, the anti-Pelagian tracts. The bishop of Hippo, unlike his younger self—and also unlike his philosophic predecessors, as he well knew—was obligated not to let so much as his word choice cause scandal to pious and uneducated ears.1