Economic Rhetoric

views updated

Economic Rhetoric

The expression economic rhetoric refers to the practice and study of the communication process of economic ideas, both in oral and written form. It conveys the notion of economics as a particular type of social discourse, one that uses analogies, appeals to authority, arguments by transitivity, and other rhetorical devices to persuade its audience.

The rhetorical nature of economics is the focus of a research program that began in the early 1980s, generating a significant amount of research, still ongoing, and eliciting much controversy. The pioneer authors were D. N. McCloskey and Arjo Klamer, who, moved by their dissatisfaction with conventional economic methodology, decided to investigate the scientific culture of economics.

Klamer conducted a series of interviews with eleven prominent economists from different schools of thought, asking them about their intellectual trajectory and the circumstances in which they came to elaborate their well-known models. He claims that theoretical disputes within economics are not settled by the accumulation of empirical evidence. Instead, Klamer suggests that a more promising interpretation of these disagreements should focus on their rhetorical aspects, the ongoing conversation through which economists everywhere try to persuade their audiences.

McCloskey also criticizes traditional epistemology. Under the influence of postmodernism and neopragmatism, she holds that the prevailing methodological approach is rooted in modernism, which views science as axiomatic and mathematical. Although the progressive mathematization of contemporary economics allowed certain questions to be formulated with greater clarity, it involved major costs, one of them being a widespread tendency to confuse statistical significance with economic significance. McCloskey acknowledges that the change in language brought some transparency to economic arguments, but she claims that it hindered the dialogue with other humanistic disciplines and led economists to subscribe to a positivist methodology. She argues that economists should pay attention to their rhetoric, in order to gain a new self-consciousness of their conversation practices.

At the heart of the debate raised by the rhetorical turn in the history of economics lies a tension that has existed since the ancient Greeks and is not yet settled. It stems from the two potentially conflicting meanings that the word rhetoric acquires, as form and as substance, as mere ornament to speech and as a set of arguments directed at an audience. While some Sophist philosophers stressed the ornamental aspect of rhetoric, thus helping to give the concept the pejorative meaning of “mere rhetoric,” Aristotle legitimated it as a rational procedure, intimately connected to logic and dialectic. During the twentieth century, the rehabilitation of the Aristotelian tradition expressed the need for a better understanding of how a persuasive discourse works to influence its intended readers.

Still, the pejorative and dismissive meaning of rhetoric as empty speech persists. The rhetorical turn in economics was unable to give a satisfactory answer to its critics, who accused it of neglecting the truth-seeking nature of scientific inquiry. Yet it drew attention to the argumentative aspect of economics, highlighting the importance of rhetorical analysis as a research tool, to be used to show how texts conceived in a given social context create meaning, construct knowledge, and elicit action. By paying attention to their rhetoric, economists can improve the quality of their discourse.

SEE ALSO Aristotle; Economics; Epistemology; Mathematical Economics; Persuasion; Philosophy; Rhetoric