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22 - The Rhetoric of This Economics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

Daniel M. Hausman
By
Deirdre N. McCloskey
Daniel M. Hausman
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Madison
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Summary

Deirdre N. McCloskey (1942–) was educated at Harvard University, taught for many years at the University of Chicago and the University of Iowa, and is currently a UIC Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago. McCloskey was Donald until 1995. She describes her transition in Crossing: A Memoir. In addition to her long-standing research interests in economic history, in the 1980s McCloskey became interested in the ways in which economists persuade one another, and her work on the rhetoric of economics poses a serious challenge to traditional views of economic methodology. The author of twenty books and three hundred articles, McCloskey has been an extremely influential figure.

In the opening scene of the movie The Graduate a Mr. McGuire puts an avuncular arm around the Dustin Hoffman character and says, “I just want to say one word to you. Just one word.” Yes, sir? “Are you listening?” Yes, I am. “Plastics.” [Pause] Exactly how do you mean it? “There's a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?” Yes, I will. “Enough said: that's a deal.”

So nowadays the avuncular word to the wise is “rhetoric.” There's a great future in rhetoric. Furthermore, unlike plastics, rhetoric has also had a great past, the twenty centuries during which it was the educator of the young and the theory of speech in the West – as the classicist Werner Jaeger called it, “the first humanism,” the “rhetorical paideia.”

Type
Chapter
Information
The Philosophy of Economics
An Anthology
 , pp. 415 - 430
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2007

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