Way We Argue Now

Amanda Anderson is the Caroline Donovan Professor of English Literature and Department Chair at Johns Hopkins University. Her books include "The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment" (Princeton) and "Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture".

• Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 Part I. Critical Practices Chapter 1: Debatable Performances: Restaging Contentious Feminisms 21 Chapter 2: The Temptations of Aggrandized Agency: Feminist Histories and the Horizon of Modernity 46 Part II. Living Universalism Chapter 3: Cosmopolitanism, Universalism, and the Divided Legacies of Modernity 69 Chapter 4: Realism, Universalism, and the Science of the Human 93 Part III. Ethos and Argument Chapter 5: Pragmatism and Character 115 Chapter 6: Argument and Ethos 134 Chapter 7: Beyond Sincerity and Authenticity 161: The Ethos of Proceduralism Index 189

"How do we argue now? Vigorously and with vim, if Amanda Anderson's new book is any indication. Anderson worries that the poststructuralist critique of reason, together with identity politics' sociological reductionism, threatens to undermine our capacity to argue, but she puts the lie to her own concern in this well-argued book. And she gives her readers much to argue with. We should all rise to her challenge and respond to this book in ways that participate in, extend, and (dare I say it?) trouble the culture of argument that Anderson here seeks to promote and surely exemplifies."—Bonnie Honig, Professor of Political Science, Northwestern University and senior research fellow, American Bar Foundation