Mark Blaug, the chief Popperian among economists, reviewed The Rhetoric of Economics in 1987 and showed like Backhouse and Pressman and Butos and Mäki that the argument must be elusive, since he didn't get it. I am puzzled. Over the 1980s he and several other economic methodologists (Coats, Caldwell, de Marchi, Backhouse, Hausman, McPherson) participated in conversations literal and epistolary about the rhetorical turn. You would think they would have come to understand it by the ordinary process of courteous conversation, which they all engaged in to the limits of their patience. If they understood the rhetorical turn I think they would agree with it, since it merely retails a liberal intellectuality that they themselves practice (that is, when they are not indulging in a McCarthyism of the center). The idea that economics might be “criticized” in the sense of literary criticism or of speech communications is implicit in much of their own work. As I've noted, Blaug subtitled his The Methodology of Economics, a Popperian survey of economic Method down to 1980, How Economists Explain.

Yet they do not understand. Perhaps enough examples have been given to show that they misread the text. Then they get abusive about what they think it says.