James Boyd White's recent work is as impressive as his earlier work in terms of the clarity of argument, the originality of thought, and the commitment to social analysis that incorporates language analysis, legal theory, and ethics. While drawing from current theories of language, White does not quite belong in the postmodern tradition because he searches for authentic representations of thoughts and emotions. This brings him closer to phenomenology. His title phrase, “living speech,” taken from Simone Weil, sets forth his primary argument. He makes a distinction between living speech, which represents genuine, creative thought, and “dead speech,” which reiterates slogans, clichés, and speech patterns from a culture's ideologies, including advertising and propaganda. Dead speech endeavors to get the listener to act in a prescribed way, while living speech tries to persuade the listener to see the virtues of an argument. White's goal is to encourage living speech in order to move societies closer to love and justice. Like the postmoderns, he believes that speech is the foundational human activity because it conveys the imagination, but unlike postmoderns, he wants to talk about the ways in which speech articulates aspects of a human mind by making meaning.

The key argument centers on his quotation from Simon Weil, “No one can love and be just who does not understand the empire of force and know how not to respect it” (p. 1). Weil wrote these words during World War II, arguing that the force comes through clichés, sentimental speech, false languages, and ideologies. White draws on her visions of war and his own readings of the Iliad to show how war and other forms of force involve dehumanizing others in order to kill them. His book asks a key question: “How, as individual minds and persons, might we come to understand the ways that the empire of force is always present in our thought and speech, and learn how to resist its power by refusing to respect it?” (p. 10). He explores this question in terms of general speech practices at the same time that he explores the issues in terms of the First Amendment, the “freedom of speech,” and judicial opinions. To illustrate his argument, he draws from the Iliad as well as from a variety of writings—the Bible, Dante's Divine Comedy, Thomas Aquinas, Supreme Court opinions, legal briefs, poets including Robert Frost, Abraham Lincoln and the work of young boys just learning to write. He argues that by learning to draw on living speech in writing and speaking, citizens can avoid being captured by the empire of force, dead speech, including advertising and political propaganda. That frees speech to be directed toward building relationships that reflect justice and love. Such speech engages the imagination. Defining living speech and the ways in which it differs from other speech is the focus of the book. It is not an easy task, but the strength of his arguments makes it a worthy task.

White's first chapter focuses on the value of silence, with examples from Trappist monks and Quakers. He is also mindful of issues of what is not said, the silences within speech. For negative examples, he turns to advertising and political propaganda because these types of speech diminish persons and their desires, as well as treat persons as no more than “a cluster of wants and desires” (p. 27). He shows how the metaphor “the marketplace of ideas” leads to problems because it reduces exchanges to manipulation. Emphasizing his commitment to democracy, he embraces communitarian views of the good polity.

In Chapter 2 White argues that good, living writing is writing in which the speaker is present; it embodies personal experiences. He draws on Shakespeare's Polonius to show how clichés can sound like good advice but really mask evil, which is what dead speech can do. He uses John Ashcroft's justification of military tribunals as a second negative example because of the presumption of guilt within this argument (p. 66). The outcome is force, not legal process.

Chapter 3 pursues meaning by arguing that living speech creates surprises and life expectations through an unfolding intelligibility. Living speech enables the exchange of words, which facilitates “imagining the world” (p. 101). The fourth chapter contains the argument in the title, “Writing That Calls the Reader into Life—or Death.” White argues that in some cases, the law calls forth life and sometimes not. Living speech in the law is exemplified by Justice Louis Brandeis in his argument related to the First Amendment on free speech, Whitney v California (pp. 165–67). Chapter 5 argues for the importance of human dignity in speech and calls on classical Greek drama and judicial opinions as public forums for creating full, rich views of humanity that come about through oppositions and dramatic tensions.

The final chapter sets forth its conclusion in the title “Silence, Belief, and the Right to Speak.” White explains that democracy depends on living speech because it requires a level of serious exchange that goes beyond the articulation of preferences or interests. A discussion of belief does not draw from notions of a belief in God or a cosmology but focuses instead on belief in the individual person and his or her worth—the Quaker principle, the “God in every person” (p. 213). He closes his book by saying, “The cry of injustice is the first, last, and deepest insistence by the human being upon his or her own value, and the value of humanity itsself” (p. 203). While this last chapter clearly lays out his own ethical commitments to the human person, it does not illuminate the political implications of this commitment. The conclusion is the shortest chapter and seems rushed. Because the distinctions he has made are so important, so clearly presented, and because the interpretations are so politically rich, readers may expect more in this final chapter.

This book would fit well into philosophy of law classes because it combines legal issues with philosophical discourse and so creates a bridge between the law and philosophy, especially areas of classical political philosophy, rhetoric, and ethics. For political scientists who are teaching general law courses, this text would offer a way to explore connections between the law and ethics that draws upon classical Western literature for illustrations. For those in literature, his work offers an opportunity to examine how law and public discourse establish a literary imagination of the world. The text is rich with examples that clarify this primary distinction and so it is excellent for students. The writing is clear, free of technical language, and easily understood.

White is an interdisciplinary scholar who speaks to those interested in law, politics, literature, and ethics. His argument offers a way of understanding the present poverty of public discourse, and he invites individual citizens to speak more frankly, more openly, and with more candor in order to articulate their experience in ways that more fully present their own thinking rather than repeating political clichés. This can undo totalitarianisms of various kinds. Living Speech is an important book for thinking about how we speak with each other about justice, and so it is valuable to academics but also to political leaders. In this work, White is both a scholar and a public intellectual.