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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

Murray N. Rothbard, rhetoric, economics « Previous | |Next »
March 2, 2006

I've always been sympathetic to "Deidre McCloskey's work on how economists do economics. She emphasised that, as much as economists are interested in incontrovertible facts, models, solid logic, and mathematics, they are also constantly using metaphors to tell compelling stories about economic behaviour. In her 1985 Rhetoric of Economics she argued that economists are story-telling creatures, and they use all the tools of language and rhetoric to tell their stories. And so economics made contact with hermeneutics.

Murray N. Rothbard 's response is this:

"Rhetoric" is kissin' cousin to the short-lived "hermeneutics" movement in economics, and indeed he helped contribute to that movement. Like his friends the hermeneuticians, McCloskey insists that economics must be an eternal and perpetually "open" "conversation." Like the hermeneuticians, he is a nihilist and a village relativist. The difference is that McCloskey is far shrewder than they. In two ways: first, because he has a lock on
the term "rhetoric," and can ring the changes on that word; and second, because he is far more elusive and evasive, far more the "artful dodger," than his stodgy and plodding hermeneutical comrades.

There's a classic case of economic rhetoric: the scare quotes around hermeneutics and rhetoric (meaning they don't exist), nihilism, village relativist and comrade. This effectively displaces both the humanities (humanists just can't stand to think of numbers or mathematics) and rhetoric (economics is 'rhetorical' means writing with style and passion).

You can sense the rest in this kind of scientific discourse: the words 'philosophy' and 'metaphysics' are treated with contempt and it is held that economics has nothing to do with ethics (because of the positive/normative distinction) .

The point was missed. Economics, like mathematics and analytic philosophy , is primarily based around deductive reasoning based on a chain of logic from implicit axioms (which can be and have been made explicit, in all their infinite variety) to a rigorous qualitative conclusion. There are lots of "then," "therefore," "so" in this form of reasoning. It goes thus: under such-and-such a set of assumptions, A, the conclusion, C, must be that people are made better off. A implies C, so free trade is beneficial anywhere. If you believe the axioms, such as A, then C also must be true (valid). A implies C , with both being qualitative not quantitative.

What was attractive about McCloskey's text is that it opens up economists, their mathematical-deductive techniques and positivism to becoming more explicit about the ontologies motivating their science, research and policy; and to recognize that social reality as shaped through discourses.

The text also opens up the way that economics has a politics--most Anglo-American economics are libertarians: in favour of markets and against governments, for free trade, individual liberty and human beings as calculating machines.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 5:37 PM | | Comments (0)
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