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MATTHEW SCHERER

insist that the better part of Rawls’s saintly wisdom depends upon his unacknowledged
appeals to registers of thought and feeling that circulate throughout his texts. It has been
a source of frustration for his interpreters from early on that his arguments do not adhere
to the norms of pure game theory, or to the confines of Kantian philosophy, or to any
other single level of argumentation. In the literature, this eclecticism is generally seen as
a lamentable eccentricity, a regrettable lapse of rigor, but much of the authority wielded
by Rawls’s arguments within each level of argumentation derives precisely from his cre-
ative concatenation of these levels of discourse.

The First Basis of Rawls’s Sainthood

Paul Ricoeur has suggested something like a concern for the mode of fascination in which
readers are held in thrall to Rawls’s texts: ‘‘I propose to say that justice as fairness...
attempts to solve the difficulty of Rousseau’s famous paradoxical legislator... [so that]
justice as fairness may be understood as theearthlysolution to this paradox,’’ and, more
to the point, switching from the register of philosophical logic to that of the philosopher’s
lived experience, ‘‘the awesome magnitude of the attempt to devise such a solution may
explain the fascination Rawls’ book has exerted for nearly twenty years over friends and
adversaries alike.’’^35 Accounting for the fascination that Ricoeur notes, I would suggest,
requires accounting for the experience of confronting the text not as a collection of ab-
stract arguments but as a rhetorically sophisticated and affectively nuanced performance.
Though it is not uncommon to hear complaints about the prosaic qualities of Rawls’s
prose—that it is turgid, that it is dry, that there is no poetry to it—in fact, there is a great
deal of style to the exposition. Among his reviewers, Stuart Hampshire has come closest
to recognizing this, writing thatA Theory of Justice‘‘is a very persuasive book, being very
well argued and carefully composed, with possible objections and counterarguments fairly
weighed and considered: at the same time it conveys a moral vision and a ruling idea, and
a strongly marked personal attitude to experience.’’^36 A good part of understanding the
general ‘‘fascination’’ with Rawls noted by Ricoeur involves understanding the textual
operations that contribute so forcefully to producing it.
The triangle ofethos,pathos, andlogosthat constitutes the classical arrangement of
persuasive devices described in Aristotle’sRhetoricprovides an apt framework within
which to begin investigating Rawls’s procedure:

Of the modes of persuasion furnished by the spoken word there are three kinds. The

first kind depends on the personal character of the speaker; the second on putting

the audience into a certain frame of mind; the third on the proof, or apparent proof,

provided by the words of the speech itself. Persuasion is achieved by the speaker’s

personal character [ethos] when the speech is so spoken as to make us think him

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