McCloskey - Rhetoric of Economics
McCloskey - Rhetoric of Economics
McCloskey - Rhetoric of Economics
of Economics
SECOND EDITION
DEIRDRE N. McCLOSKEY
xix
xx
Exordium
to lynch the accused, but also persuading readers that a novel's charac-
ters breathe, or bringing scientists to accept the better argument and re-
ject the worse. The newspaper definition is Little Rhetoric. I am talking
about Big Rhetoric.
In Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent Wayne Booth gives many
useful definitions. Rhetoric is "the art of probing what men believe they
ought to believe, rather than proving what is true according to abstract
methods"; it is "the art of discovering good reasons, finding what really
warrants assent, because any reasonable person ought to be per-
suaded"; it is "careful weighing of more-or-Iess good reasons to arrive
at more-or-Iess probable or plausible conclusions-none too secure but
better than what would be arrived at by chance or unthinking im-
pulse"; it is the "art of discovering warrantable beliefs and improving
those beliefs in shared discourse"; its purpose must not be "to talk
someone else into a preconceived view; rather, it must be to engage in
mutual inquiry" (Booth 1974a, pp. xiii, xiv, 59, xiii, 137).
The question is whether the scientist-who usually fancies herself an
announcer of "results" or a stater of "conclusions" free of rhetoric-
speaks rhetorically. Does she try to persuade? I think so. Language, I just
said, is not a solitary accomplishment. The scientist doesn't speak into
the void, or to herself. She speaks to a community of voices. She desires
to be heeded, praised, published, imitated, honored, loved. These are
the desires. The devices of language are the means.
Rhetoric, to make a little joke with the definition of economics that
helped make it narrow and sleepwalking, is the proportioning of means
to desires in speech. Rhetoric is an economics of language, the study of
how scarce means are allocated to the insatiable desires of people to be
heard. It seems on the face of it a reasonable hypothesis that economists
are like other people in being talkers who desire listeners when they go
to the library or the computer center as much as when they go to the of-
fice or the polling booth. The purpose here is to see if this is true, and
to see if it is useful: to study the rhetoric of economic science. The sub-
ject is science. It is not the economy, or the adequacy of economic the-
ory as a description of the economy, or even mainly the economist's role
in the economy. The subject is the conversation economists have among
themselves, for purposes of persuading each other that the interest elas-
ticity of demand for investment is zero or that the money supply is con-
trolled by the Federal Reserve.
The purpose of thinking about how economists converse with each
other is to help the field mature as a science, not to attack it. Economics
is unsuccessful as social weather forecasting, a role forced on it by the
rhetoric of politics and journalism. But it is strikingly successful as so-
xxi
Exordium
ANALYSIS OF ECONOMICS,
AND WHY
3
4
How to Do a Rhetorical Analysis of Economics, and Why
gain only the impression that "limiting assumptions" are somehow in-
volved (they are not, by the way). The rhetorical form of the passage is
explanation; its effect in the pages of the Economic History Review is to
terrify the onlookers, convincing them that the "neoclassical" analysis
makes a lot of strange and unconvincing assumptions. By the mere
statement of the "assumptions" said to underlie the "neoclassical" cal-
culation one can cast doubt on the calculation in the eyes of all histori-
ans and many economists.
In replying to a sharp rebuttal by Mark Thomas in a later issue of the
Review, Nicholas repeats the turn. The last sentence of his exordium
makes the argument explicit: "The long list of restrictive assumptions cau-
tions the economic historians that, at best, the Solow index is a crude
measure from which to draw conclusions about historical change"
(Nicholas 1985, p. 577, italics supplied). The ethos here is of the Profound
Thinker defending the innocents from other Profound (but Irresponsi-
ble) Thinkers.
cal and medieval times" (p. 8). Alike in his scientific and his journalis-
tic work, "Bastable based his writing not upon shared technical knowl-
edge but on a shared understanding of an educated culture more
widely defined" (p. 15).
Modern economics is quite different, obscure in style. The obscurity
of the style is necessary to defend scientific ethos. St. Augustine, as the
literary critic Gerald Bruns noted, viewed the obscurity of the Bible as
having "a pragmatic function in the art of winning over an alienated
and even contemptuous audience" (Bruns 1984, p. 157). Obscurity is not
rare in religion and science. Bruns quotes Augustine (who might as
well be justifying the obscurities of a mathematical economist proving
the obvious): "I do not doubt that this situation was provided by God
to conquer pride by work and to combat disdain in our minds, to which
those things which are easily discovered seem frequently to be worth-
less" (p. 157).
And Novelists
The word "story" is not vague in literary criticism. Ger-
ald Prince used some ingenious mental experiments with stories and
nonstories to formulate a definition of the "minimal story," which has
three conjoined events. The first and third events are stative
[such as "Korea was poor"], the second is active [such as "then
Koreans educated themselves"]. Furthermore, the third event
is the inverse of the first [such as "Then as a result Korea was
rich"] .... The three events are conjoined by conjunctive features
in such a way that (a) the first event precedes the second in time
and the second precedes the third, and (b) the second event
causes the third. (Prince 1973, p. 31)
14
How to Do a Rhetorical Analysis of Economics, and Why
Prince's technique isolates what is storied about the tales that we rec-
ognize as stories.
Is this a story? A man laughed and a woman sang. No, it does not feel like
one-in the uninstructed sense we learned at our mother's knee. (Of
course in a more instructed way, after Joyce and Kafka, not to speak of
writers of French detective fiction, anything can be a "story.") The fol-
lowing sounds more like an old-fashioned story: John was rich, then he lost
a lot of money. At least it has the claim of sequence of consequence,
"then." And it has the inversion of status ("rich ... poor"). But it doesn't
quite make it. Consider, A woman was happy, then she met a man, then, as
a result, she was unhappy. Right. If feels like a complete story, as "gener-
ally and intuitively recognized" (Prince 1973, p. 5). Contrast: Mary was
rich and she traveled a lot, then, as a result, she was rich. Something is screwy.
What is screwy is that her status is not inverted from what it was.
One can use Prince's examples to construct stories and non-stories in
economics. Test the pattern:
Poland was poor, then it adopted capitalism, then as a result it became rich.
The money supply increased this year, then, as a result, productivity last
year rose and the business cycle three decades ago peaked.
A few firms existed in chemicals, then they merged, and then only one
firm existed.
Britain in the later nineteenth century was capitalistic and rich and pow-
erful.
The pattern is story / nonstory / story / nonstory.
Stories end in a new state. If a 5 percent tax on gasoline is said by
some congressman or journalist to be "designed" to fall entirely on pro-
ducers the economist will complain, saying "It's not an equilibrium."
"Not an equilibrium" is the economist's way of saying that she disputes
the ending proposed by some untutored person. Any descendant of
Adam Smith, left or right, whether by way of Marx or Marshall, Veblen
or Menger, will be happy to tell you a better story.
Many of the scientific disagreements inside economics turn on this
sense of an ending. To an eclectic Keynesian, raised on picaresque tales
of economic surprise, the story idea Oil prices went up, which caused in-
flation is full of meaning, having the merits that stories are supposed to
have. But to a monetarist, raised on the classical unities of money, it
seems incomplete, no story at all, a flop. As the economist A. C. Har-
berger likes to say, it doesn't make the economics "sing." It ends too
soon, half-way through the second act: a rise in oil prices without some
corresponding fall elsewhere is "not an equilibrium."
From the other side, the criticism of monetarism by Keynesians is
15
How to Do a Rhetorical Analysis of Economics, and Why
Writing Is Performance
The point is not peculiar to deconstruction. In a way it
is one of the chief findings of humanism. Books do not "reproduce" the
world. They evoke it. Skillful fiction, whether in the form of Northanger
Abbey or The Origin of Species, "stimulates us to supply what is not there,"
as Virginia Woolf remarked of Austen. "What she offers is, apparently,
a trifle, yet is composed of something that expands in the reader's mind
and endows with the most enduring form of life scenes which are out-
wardly trivial" (1925, p. 142). Commenting on her remark in turn, the
critic Wolfgang Iser put it this way: "What is missing from the appar-
ently trivial scenes, the gaps arising out of the dialogue-this is what
stimulates the reader into filling the blanks with projections. [Iser's
image is of the reader running a motion picture inside his head, which
is, of course, why novels can still compete with television.] ... The 'en-
during form of life' which Virginia Woolf speaks of is not manifested on
the printed page; it is a product arising out of the interaction between
text and reader" (1980, pp. 110-11).
As Arjo Klamer (1987) has shown for the postulate of economic ra-
tionality, scientific persuasion, too, is like that. Persuasion of the most
rigorous kind has blanks to be filled at every other step, whether it is
18
How to Do a Rhetorical Analysis of Economics, and Why
Axis of Particularity
Logic Metaphor general
impersonal personal
Axis of Impersonality
TO RHETORIC
156
157
From Methodology to Rhetoric
says the epistemologist, "the only way we know is such and such." But
this declaration does not persuade ordinary people and ordinary sci-
entists. They take it as obvious that we know in many ways, not always
reducible to sight or synthetic a priori.
The "ultimate" way is not relevant. We need intellectual nourishment
here and now, not epistemological pie in the sky. The appeal of episte-
mological methodologists since Bacon to experimental facts as the "ul-
timate arbiter," for instance, will dismiss mere reflection as an idol to
be cast into the flames or at least pushed off its altar. John Dewey, the
voice of pragmatism, replies, "Such wholesale depreciation ignores the
value inherent even in the most subjective reflection, for it takes the set-
tled estate which is proof that thought is not needed, or that it has done
its work, as if it supplied the standard for the occasions in which prob-
lems are hard upon us, and doubt is rife" (1916, p. 196f.). Dewey is here
close to another friend of methodological breadth, Cardinal Newman,
who hewed to broad-church reasoning. Thirty years earlier the cardinal
had written that "assent on reasonings not demonstrative is too widely
recognized an act to be irrational, unless man's nature is irrational, too
familiar to the prudent and clearminded to be an infirmity or an ex-
travagance" (1870, p. 150). By defending a catholicity of reasonings, of
course, Dewey and Newman were not rejecting fact, or advocating the
shutting down of laboratories. They were rejecting a restrictive meth-
odism that narrows human reason to one particular kind of fact and
puts most facts and most reasons beyond reasoning.
Anyone would commend the vision of scientific exploration that the
best of the epistemological methodologists seem to have. It amounts to
a dialectic, in the Continental sense foreign to the traditions of analytic
philosophy. Dewey and Newman would have approved. Genuine ex-
ploration is brave and good. Refusing to offer hostages to evidence,
though not rare even in modernist circles, is cowardly: so much you can
take from the idea of falsification by evidence. Facing facts, we all agree,
is good. In this modest sense we are all "empiricists." The problem
comes, and the modernist shouting begins, with the words "empirical"
and "evidence." Should it all be "objective," "experimental," "positive,"
"observable"? Can it be? I doubt it.
Something is awry with an appeal for an open intellectual society, an
appeal defending itself on liberal grounds, that begins by demarcating
certain ways of reasoning as forbidden and certain fields of study as
meaningless. The intolerance in modernism shows in Popper's The Open
Society and Its Enemies (1945), which firmly closed the borders of his open
society to psychoanalysts and Marxists-charged with violating all
manner of modernist regulations. The difficulty is that on these grounds
159
From Methodology to Rhetoric
Popper would have to close the borders as well to a line of physicists from
Galileo Galilei to the charmers of subatomic particles. During the 1890s
some physicists did in fact reject atomism on the properly modernist
grounds that such matters were not observable; and nowadays, as the
physicist Steven Weinberg has noted (1983, pp. 9f.), no modernist would
hunt for quarks. An economist wetback seized for working in such an
open society would be deported summarily on the next truck <though
pleading from the back his properly modernist credentials).
That adding methodological constraints to science cannot in general
be wise will strike economists as obvious. Constraints, after all, con-
strain. The contrary notion that a rule-bound methodology is good for
you has been much questioned recently by philosophers. Paul Feyer-
abend's demolitions of the philosophy of science and Richard Rorty's
deconstructions of philosophy have left methodologists apoplectic.
Rorty views the history of epistemology since Plato as an intellectual bet
that did not come off: "People have, oddly enough, found something
interesting to say about the essence of Force, and the definition of
'number.' They might have found something interesting to say about
the essence of Truth. But in fact they haven't" (1982, p. xiv).
The founding rule of Descartes himself has been scrutinized in this
way by J. A. Schuster, who concludes that Descartes's "method-talk
was not abstracted from successful practice in some area of mathemat-
ics [much less physics]; it was produced by a megalomaniacal perfor-
mance of operations of analogical extension upon the terms of a dis-
course, universal mathematics [one of Descartes's projects], which itself
could not do what it was purported to do" (1983, p. 19).
The philosophers are here following antimethodological findings
from other fields. In particular the sociology and history of science
since 1962 or so have left the old rules of methodology looking unper-
suasive. The sociologists and historians took to discovering what actu-
ally happened in science, favoring what happened over the Astounding
Stories retailed in the opening chapters of science books. By this simple
device the methodological claims of modernism have been rejected, re-
peatedly. It can be tried in economics, as we've seen.
tuals for real conversation. The lack of interest in what that idiot Jones
has to say makes much intellectual dispute puerile. Durkheim and
Weber were contemporaries at the birth of sociology, worked on similar
subjects, and contributed largely to networks of conversation in their
fields, yet neither so much as mentioned the other (Lepienes 1983). But
such stories, like the passions about Jones, are felt to be violations of the
intellectual Sprachethik.
The notion of a conversation gives an answer to the demand for stan-
dards of persuasiveness. You recognize with ease when a conversation
in one's own field is working well. Most economists would agree, for in-
stance, that at present the conversation about game theory is not work-
ing well, after some early promise. Abstract general equilibrium, like-
wise, suffered a sharp decline from a brief period of brilliance. On the
other hand, no economist familiar with the situation would doubt that
the conversation in economic history improved radically from the 1950s
to the 1960s, and continues at this higher level.
The conversations overlap enough to make you almost as sure about
neighboring fields: examining the overlap is what editors, referees, and
members of research panels do. The overlaps of the overlaps, as Polanyi
once observed, keep all honest if some try to be. Q.E.D.: the overlapping
conversations provide the standards. It is a market argument. There is
no need for philosophical lawmaking or methodological regulation to
keep the economy of intellect running just fine.
Amelie Oksenberg Rorty writes that what is crucial is "our ability to
engage in continuous conversation, testing one another, discovering
our hidden presuppositions, changing our minds because we have lis-
tened to the voices of our fellows. Lunatics also change their minds, but
their minds change with the tides of the moon and not because they
have listened, really listened, to their friends' questions and objections"
(1983, p. 562). It's a woman's view as well, this listening. We can pray
for such a character of argument in economics. Perhaps when econo-
mists are disburdened of their philosophical baggage and begin to look
at how they converse-really converse-it will be so.
But neither, really, are other sciences. Economists can relax. Other sci-
ences, even the other mathematical sciences, are rhetorical. Mathemat-
ics, to take the queen herself, seems to an outsider to be the limiting ex-
ample of objectivity, explicitness, and demonstrability. Surely here only
Truth counts, not human words. A long line of intellectuals has be-
lieved that here is bedrock, the ultimate authority. Yet standards of
mathematical demonstration change, as the example of Euler in Chap-
ter 4 hints. The last seventy years have been a disappointment to fol-
lowers of David Hilbert, who intended to put mathematics on timeless
and indubitable foundations. The historian of mathematics Morris
Kline wrote that "it is now apparent that the concept of a universally ac-
cepted, infallible body of reasoning-the majestic mathematics of 1800
and the pride of man-is a grand illusion." Or again: "There is no rig-
orous definition of rigor. A proof is accepted if it obtains the endorse-
ment of the leading specialists of the time and employs the principles
that are fashionable at the moment. But no standard is universally ac-
ceptable today" (Kline 1980, pp. 6, 315).
Kline's point does not apply to the broad interior of mathematics,
about which no one has serious doubts, but to its frontiers. An instance
is the controversy some time ago about a computerized proof of the
four-color proposition (the proposition that maps can be drawn with-
out ambiguity in four colors only, unproven since Moebius noticed it in
1840). The question was whether a calculation that could be done only
by an electronic computer and not ever by a human mind could playa
part in a "proof." The rhetoric of proof was in question.
Kline's opinions are not widely accepted by mathematicians. Appar-
ently more popular are those of Philip J. Davis and Reuben Hersh,
whose book The Mathematical Experience (1981) was described in the
American Mathematical Monthly as "one of the masterpieces of our age."
Yet Davis and Hersh speak of the crisis of confidence in modern math-
ematical philosophy in terms nearly identical to Kline's. In the work of
the Ideal Mathematician, they say, "the line between complete and in-
complete proof is always somewhat fuzzy, and often controversial"
(p. 34; d. p. 40). They quote Solomon Feferman, who writes, "It is also
clear that the search for ultimate foundations via formal systems has
failed to arrive at any convincing conclusion" (p. 357). Without using
the word, Davis and Hersh argue that what is required is a rhetoric of
mathematics: