Deliberate Conflict Argument, Political Theory and Composition Classes Patricia Roberts-Miller     June 2004 cloth, 0-8093-2566-7, $45.00 272 pages, 6 x 9 Rhetoric and Composition / Political Theory   “Roberts-Miller provides a much-needed backdrop to discussions about how to teach argument and, more fundamentally, about how to responsibly fulfill an often-cited goal of university writing courses: to help students become discursively responsive and responsible citizens of a democracy. Deliberate Conflict offers a conceptual framework that will aid compositionists in trying to sort out the often confusing array of strategies at hand for teaching argument.” —Susan Jarratt, author of Rereading the Sophists   In Deliberate Conflict: Argument, Political Theory, and Composition Classes, Patricia Roberts-Miller argues that much current discourse about argument pedagogy is hampered by fundamental unspoken disagreements over what democratic public discourse should look like. The book’s pivotal question is: In what kind of public discourse do we want our students to engage? To answer this, the text provides a taxonomy, discussion, and evaluation of political theories underpinning democratic discourse, highlighting the relationship between various models of the public sphere and rhetorical theory.   Roberts-Miller seeks to diffuse student antagonism toward argumentation by increasing instructors’ awareness of different models of democracy in argument pedagogy. She provides a range of theories, discussing the major features and rhetorical applicability of the liberal, the interest-based, the communitarian, and the deliberative models of the public domain.   Deliberate Conflict cogently advocates reintegrating instruction in argumentation into the composition curriculum. By linking effective argumentation in the public sphere with the ability to affect social change, Roberts-Miller pushes compositionists beyond a simplistic Aristotelian conception of how argumentation works and offers a means by which to prepare students for active participation in public discourse.   Patricia Roberts-Miller is an assistant professor of rhetoric and composition at the University of Texas-Austin. She is the author of Voices in the Wilderness: The Paradox of the Puritan Public Sphere and the editor of the Harcourt Brace Sourcebook for Teachers of Writing.