ABSTRACT

In “The Rhetoric of Economics,” Donald McCloskey (1983) argues for a new approach to the methodology of economics. The official methodology is “modernism,” which consists of “an amalgam of logical positivism, behaviorism, operationalism, and the hypothetico-deductive model of science” (p. 484). But modernism is a poor method because it is “obsolete in philosophy” (p. 486), has not been followed in other sciences (pp. 491–93), runs into problems of application in economics (pp. 487–88); indeed, is itself “impossible” (p. 488). If this were not enough, any method is arrogant and pretentious; (p. 490). Economists need not worry, however, because our unofficial methodology, what economists actually follow, is rhetoric — honorable but unexamined (p. 493). Praised earlier as “disciplined conversation” (pp. 482–83), rhetoric is a literary matter (p. 499), heavily metaphorical, which comprises a poetics of economics (pp. 502–05). Various examples of such rhetoric are offered (pp. 495–508) and the benefits of its study are enumerated (pp. 512–15).