In many intellectual and academic circles, the second half of this century has witnessed an increased awareness of what might be called the rhetorization of knowledge. That is to say, we in academia have turned at least part of our scholarly attention not only to the production of useful information but also to the study of the epistemological, ideological, political, and economic conditions out of which such information or knowledge develops. In various disciplines across the academic landscape, many of us now see our work as something more involved than the discovery of whatever truths might pertain to our chosen fields of inquiry. Instead, we see ourselves and our work as participating in a series of continuous, overlapping, and often concurrent discursive exchanges, and we see the knowledge we produce from this dialogic interaction as useful but temporary, or to be more accurate, contingent.

It is in this spirit of inquiry that Fredric Gale’s Political Literacy: Rhetoric, Ideology, and the Possibility of Justice examines a discourse that has traditionally disavowed any claims of contingency, of rhetoricity: the discourse of legal jurisprudence as manifested in court decisions and other such scenes of legal interpretation. Gale points out in the introduction that his concern “is not about the way lawyers and judges use language to persuade” (2). Instead, he notes that his study “is one step more abstract, being concerned with the rhetoric of justification, that is, the discourse that purports to explain the rules by which opinions become law” (2). While at first this may seem a rather erudite and scholastic exercise, Gale argues that until “the political and economic realities of jurisprudence” are identified and understood, no citizenry can hope to achieve the political empowerment necessary to secure a meaningful notion of justice, one by which the conditions of people’s lives are substantially improved.

In order to establish a postmodern or rhetoricized notion of justice, one that does not “rationalize public norms” in the way that traditional perspectives do, Gale describes and examines several approaches to the concept of justice, including that of the Critical Legal Studies movement in the United States (65). This group is comprised of theorists who argue for a conception of justice that takes into account the political elements that are always in play whenever a legal interpretation takes place. Marxian in its overall emphasis, the movement seeks to go beyond the classically liberal orientations of realism and pragmatism, which it sees as essentially hostile to the pursuit of justice, to a recognition of “the institution of law as the enforcer of inscribed political hegemony” (69). Whereas the liberal traditions seek to demonstrate the law’s legitimacy and inevitability, the Critical Legal Studies movement argues that the law carries with it an inescapably ideological dimension that has definite consequences in people’s lives. This leads critical legal theorists “beyond realism, which they tend to see as descriptive, to a modern theory that is actively reformist” (67).

Situating Critical Legal Studies alongside “various postmodern intellectual movements,” including deconstruction and social constructionism, Gale thus chronicles a theoretical field that is, despite the specific differences between its various participants, united in its attempt to reject a notion of justice founded on an obsession with the disinterested apprehension of first principles (81). Such a position is what we might call classic anti­foundationalism, which Gale identifies as “the epistemological corollary of deconstruction” and which in this instance argues that any foundations for legal interpretive theory must be “contingent upon social behavior” (88). It holds to the belief that “the law is not a universal, timeless set of rules that arises by necessity but is created, defined, and maintained by the discourse in which it is situated” (129).

The book’s major question, then becomes how to pursue goals of “democratic empowerment” and “transformative justice” in the absence of stable and reliable markers by which to measure such effects? Gale points to Critical Legal Studies’ inability to offer anything beyond a severe and accurate critique of current theories and practices, loan apparently built-in deconstructive element that hobbles any attempt to formulate a plan of action that would assert a set of agreed-upon values for the pursuit of justice. Those of us familiar with other efforts in other disciplines (including our own) to organize deconstructive and social constructionist ideas into workable programs probably understand the difficulties these critical legal theorists must experience. Once our notion of textuality is expanded to include almost every human action, written or otherwise, then every human action becomes a potential site of rhetorical/deconstructive analysis. To place limits on the lengths and depths of interpretation, to choose what counts as worthy of interpretation—these are ideological and political decisions, although we may not recognize them as such. And even if we arrive at that understanding, as has the Critical Legal Studies movement, what do we do with that knowledge? That is, how do we secure universal justice if we are inescapably perspectival?

Gale has no clear answer for this, and perhaps he shouldn’t. Perhaps it is simply a paradox we have to live with. However, he does turn to two familiar writers for some sort of explanation. Paraphrasing Derrida, who suggests an ultimately untenable but still useful distinction between justice as law and justice as a thing or a concept in and of itself, Gale interprets Derrida to suggest that “justice in the real, concrete sense occurs only in the gap between the possibility of justice and the impossibility of justice—always expected, never here in the present” (135). Gale recognizes the radical, “some would say reckless,” nature of such a position, arguing as it does “in direct opposition to everything that lawyers have been attempting to accomplish in centuries of legal interpretation” (135). It is an intellectually appealing position, perhaps, but we might have difficulty translating its subtlety and complexity into the messy and rhetorically charged arena of human affairs.

In the end, however, Gale turns to Henry Giroux after coming to the conclusion that while we can “rationalize the need for moral and civic virtue,” we cannot “establish any theoretical basis” for it (157). The presumed need for such a basis confounds us, keeps us from articulating visions of justice “out of a morally commendable hesitancy to take a moral position” (158). Gale suggests that “people like Giroux” don’t have this problem because they appear to be possessed of a certain “missionary zeal” that enables them to insist on the inseparability of radical critique from partisan politics.

It seems that if political literacy is to be achieved, if a just notion of justice is to be pursued or perhaps even arrived at, we will need more people like Giroux and their “missionary zeal” clearing the theoretical path on which others may travel as they struggle to reconcile their moral and ethical inclinations with their decidedly postmodern sensibilities. This conflict is at the center of Gale’s study, as it is at the heart of any discussion that means to address the question of values in a time when the very notion of values is thoroughly and rightfully under investigation. I think we would not want things to be otherwise, because a morality can cause harm if not kept open to the kind of deep interrogation provided by the rhetorical turn that characterizes much postmodern thought. We have historical evidence to attest to this. Likewise, a critique that pretends not to be informed by some sort of moral or ethical imperative is bound to be exposed as naive at best and pernicious at worst.