The Recovery of Rhetoric edited by R.H. Roberts and J.M.M.Good

Persuasive Discourse and Disciplinary in the Human Sciences. This collection of essays by distinguished international scholars from various disciplines addresses the widespread and growing interest in the nature and function of rhetoric, and in the rhetorical analysis of such human sciences as psychology, political science, economics, medicine and philosophy.

The essays use literary theory and philosophical analysis to reveal the persuasive strategies and the nature of argument in human science disciplines. Some explore the history science discipline. some explore the history of rhetorical theory and practice, while others show how rhetoric has constituted knowledge in particular disciplines of the human sciences. Taken together they work to elucidate the concept of 'disciplinarity', thus contributing to the emerging critique of this form of modern knowledge-production and the conditions, such as boundary work and field constitution that make it possible. 

The book may be situated with the new studies that show how disciplines have been constructed, legitimated, and institutionalised and, in particular, with those focusing on the material, social and rhetorical practices that have produced disciplinary knowledges and disciplines themselves. While the disciplines often present their knowledges as purely objective, their knowledges as purely objective,their  knowledges are, as the book shows, only available in rhetorical from. Rhetoric is thus not merely a medium through which knowledge is communicated of but rather that which is constitutive of knowledge itself.