ABSTRACT
The above passage, I think, conveys very nicely the aims and method of the now decadeold rhetoric of economics movement. The movement aims to be revisionary. By “exposing” the constitutive metaphors driving both economic discourse and our assent to its authority (Klamer and Leonard 1994:41), rhetorical economics makes possible, even “compels,” the conceptualization of “alternative discursive practices in economics.” What is the mechanism of revisionary reconceptualization? Jack Amariglio, Stephen Resnick, and Richard Wolff (1990) elucidate the process. Exposing the rhetorical character of economic discourse and behavior shows these to be cultural and normative rather than natural and rationalist, based on some universal logical imperative. “Abandoning the search for the essence of economic theory,” they write, “leads to a deconstruction and reconstitution of the economics discipline,” and thus makes possible changes in the discipline that could precipitate changes in the policies economics bolsters and promotes. Amariglio, Resnick, and Wolff themselves espouse what they call a “nonessentialist Marxism” (137), but the revisionist aspirations of the rhetorical economists are fundamentally methodological rather than merely partisan. In the words of the movement’s leading theorist, Deirdre (Donald) McCloskey-an unabashed neoclassical whose 1985 book has given the movement its name-supplanting the current formalism of economics with rhetorical analysis will “improve” the practice of economics and perhaps, too, economic practice.
