ABSTRACT
During the course of the 1980s, the emergence of rhetoric represented one of the major developments within the literature on economic methodology. At the hands of McCloskey, a principal advocate and protagonist of rhetoric, conventional economic methodology was radically challenged to reconsider its fundamental status and relevance to economics. More generally, McCloskey challenged the larger intellectual enterprise of modernism and its attendant methodological prescriptions. For McCloskey, economic methodology is entrapped within a dictatorially prescriptive methodological framework, essentially based on positivism, which is both redundant and irrelevant to a subject such as economics. Rhetoric, as envisaged by McCloskey, has the capacity to subvert the ‘official’ methodology of economics by demonstrating the extent to which the actual practice of economists fails to conform to their proclaimed methodological position. The corollary is the extent to which rhetoric represents a more insightful and plausible framework to account for the actual methodological practice of economists. The agenda arising from McCloskey’s insistence on the superiority of the rhetorical approach is both challenging and of fundamental significance. In this chapter we examine McCloskey’s case in some detail and challenge various central aspects of his rhetorical thesis.
