Let me put it this way. The role of rhetoric, according to Burke, is the demystification of the ideological. The role of political economy is the demystification of relations tied to the economic. If we’re to understand where we are and what is happening to us—and maybe even to affect it—we need the tools provided by both. But we think of “economics” as a numbers game. And we humanities types tend to fear numbers.
But we might fear a little less if we come to regard economics as yet another instance of the rhetorical. At least one economist has made that assertion, and there’s a group of economists who believe she’s right. That economist is Deirdre McCloskey. She writes that [most intellectuals] since about 1880—have not read enough economics. They imagine she goes on to say that a smattering of Marx will do. The English professor, still quoting the economist, who has neglected Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, not to speak of Freidman, Galbraith, Samuelson, Hirschman, Heilbroner, Schelling, Coase, Becker, Fogel, Olson, Buchanan, Kirzner, or the other modern masters is missing a lot. He is missing, for example, the logic of unintended consequences. And he is missing the facts of modern economic growth (Knowledge and Persuasion xi). That’s quite a sanction. And it’s something of an embarrassment, insofar as this economist—Deirdre McCloskey[2]—is writing for an ontology of economics as a rhetoric. The Rhetoric of Economics, the title of two of her books and implicit in three others, has been around since the early 1980s.
