The answer, of course, is “yes,” and at one time the very question would have seemed impertinent. Smith, Marx, Mill, Marshall, Keynes, Heckscher, Schumpeter, and Viner, to name a few, were nourished by historical study and nourished it in turn.

The volume is a selection of the papers presented at the conference. Other presentations were:

Frank Hahn (Economics, Cambridge University): “On Some Common Mistakes in Economic Theorizing.”

Robert W. Clower (Economics, University of South Carolina): “Keynes and the Classicals Revisited.”

Gordon Winston: Comments on the papers by Hahn, Clower, and Folbre and Hartmann.

John Nelson (Political Science, University of Iowa): Comments on the papers by Hahn, Clower, and Folbre and Hartmann.

Zvi Griliches (Economics, Harvard University): Comments on paper by Denton.

Axel Leyonhufvud (Economics, UCLA): Comments on papers by Weintraub and Mirowski.

Donald Lavoie (Economics, George Mason University): Comments on papers by Bicchieri, Coats, and Wolff and Resnick.

“Economic Rhetoric and the General Public”: A panel discussion among David Warsh, Craufurd Goodwin (see their chapters in volume), Joe Kalt (Economics, Harvard University), Karen Arenson (the New York Times), and Robert Samuelson (Newsweek).

“Economic Rhetoric in the Political Arena”: A panel discussion among Galbraith, Keohane (see their papers in this volume), and Jeffrey Sachs (Economics, Harvard University).

In the early spring of 1986 about thirty economists, economic journalists, rhetoricians, philosophers, a political scientist, and a literary theorist gathered at Wellesley College for a conference on the Rhetoric of Economics. The composition of the group seemed unusual. Economists and humanists, after all, live in two different cultures and usually do not take each other's scholarly activities seriously. The conference could be an indication that times are changing.

The change is the emergence of a new “conversation” about economics that aspires to displace the dominant, positivistic view. The time is ripe, since positivism is losing its grip on the collective consciousness of economists and others as well. Its claim that “logic” and “facts” are the sole standards for the appraisal of economic theories does not appear to do justice to the complex reality in which economists operate. The new conversation attempts to alter our understanding of the reality by calling attention to the discursive aspects of economics, more particularly to its rhetorical forms.

The editors of the volume called the conference to explore the consequences of and to understand the resistance to this new point of view. We considered the participation of philosophers, rhetoricians, and literary theorists alongside economic practitioners to be critical. After all, now that we economists are becoming interested in our language and in our rhetorical devices, we would do well to pay attention to those scholars who have spent their professional lives thinking, writing, and talking about these subjects.

The Last Word suggests a rhetoric of “bringing the conversation to a conclusion.” A conclusion would be too ambitious here. After all, aside from the trickle of anticipations by Robert Clower, Albert Hirschman, Mark Perlman, and a few others it has only been a while that economists have thought about words like rhetoric, conversation, and the social structure of scientific discourse. We are just beginning an economic criticism, as in “literary criticism,” giving new readings of economics and maybe of the economy, too. A handful of people have tried to write criticism, some in this book. But the arbitrage between economics and the rest of the culture has only just begun.

So wait and see. At present it would be premature for advocates of the rhetorical approach to erect Conclusions for all time. Likewise, it would be premature for those who now consider themselves as its opponents – we live in hope they will realize soon that they are its natural allies – to throttle the infant in its cradle. Their rhetoric has been “Show me now sixty full and finished pieces of literary criticism of economics, or I won't take it seriously.” We can show them six or ten or maybe twenty, and daily we produce more. Each day another economist sees that economics deserves a richer technique of reading than a three-by-five-card philosophy of science. It dawns on us that that those people in English and linguistics and communication studies cannot really all be idiots unworthy of attention.

Exordium

“As civilized human beings,” wrote Michael Oakeshott in 1933, “we are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation begun in the primeval forest and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries.” In economics a few years ago a conversation about the conversation began.

Why it began is not clear. It might be interpreted as just carrying on an old conversation about how economists know (if they do), a methodological conversation started a century and more ago by John Stuart Mill. The new remark in the early 1980s was simply that economists use arguments beyond syllogism and measurement. The point of making it was not to undercut the mathematics in economics, as nonmathematicians sometimes wish they could. The point was merely to note that all economists, mathematical or not, use analogies, appeals to authority, and other rhetorical devices, using them as thoroughly as poets and preachers, though with less understanding of why they do so. So the recent conversation about conversation can be interpreted as more of the old stuff, an inward and philosophical affair (Klant 1985).

The new conversation might also be interpreted as arising from the battle of schools. This would be additional looking inward. Disagreements among economists are commonly exaggerated, even by economists themselves, yet it is true that the field had become by 1980 more warlike than fifteen years before. Everyone knows about the battle between Keynesians and monetarists (the tags mean something different now to politicians than they once meant to economists).

Outsiders make the same complaint about philosophers as they do about economists, saying, These writers thin down the question so. And so they both do. The economist thins the question of the good society right down to matters of price and marginal cost. The philosopher thins the good argument right down to matters of modus tollens and infinite regress. Precision comes from the conversational thinness, as does employment and other goods. But even after such achievements, we should not be surprised if outsiders want to get back to the main and fatter point.

The trouble with using Karl Popper's thinking for a history or methodology of economic thought is not mainly some flaw in its technique, though Daniel Hausman has made the pervasiveness of the flaws clear. The main problem, even in this the richest of philosophies, is its thinness. Rich as Sir Karl's thinking is, supplemented by Lakatos, elaborated and applied with wonderful ingenuity by their followers, it looks thin beside the actual conversation of science. A conversation begun in the primeval forest, as Michael Oakeshott once said, extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries, is probably not going to fit easily into a few lines of philosophy. Or rather, since the issue is empirical, it might–it might be that a philosophy could describe well what goes on in the conversation of science–but it hasn't.