Research in the rhetoric of economics: a critical review

ABSTRACT

Although it has not always received much attention in the field of communication studies, a growing number of scholars now recognize the role of rhetoric in the constitution and maintenance of the economy. This critical review organizes and extends the body of literature on the rhetoric of economics, sketching four clear research areas emanating from Deirdre N. McCloskey’s germinal works on the subject.

KEYWORDS:

• rhetoric of economics
• rhetoric of inquiry
• new materialism

Notes

1 Ariel Edwards, “The Economy Is Still the Biggest Issue for the Voters,” Huffington Post, October 31, 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/31/economy-poll_n_6084126.html; FiveThirtyEight, “The Big Issues of the 2016 Campaign,” November 19, 2015, http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/year-ahead-project/#part1; Rebecca Riffkin, “Americans Say Government, Economy Most Important Problems,” Gallup, November 12, 2014, http://www.gallup.com/poll/179381/americans-say-government-economy-important-problems.aspx.

2 William J. Barber, A History of Economic Thought (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), 68.

3 Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, dir. John Hughes (Hollywood, CA: Paramount Pictures, 1986). Stein’s lecture was not a planned part of the film. Hughes overheard Stein, a speechwriter with a law degree and a bachelor’s in economics in real life, lecturing the film crew about supply-side economics. Hughes was so amused by Stein’s deadpan delivery of the incredibly dry material that he added it to the film.

4 Evidence of this rising interest is manifest in the 2016 proposal, drafted by 15 communication scholars, to instantiate an Economics, Communication, and Society Division of the National Communication Association (NCA). The proposal, which was accompanied by a petition that received the endorsement of more than 180 NCA members, was approved.

5 Charles Sackrey, Geoffrey Snyder, and Janet Knoedler, Introduction to Political Economy, 7th ed. (Cambridge, MA: Economic Affairs Bureau, 2013).

6 This author previously published as Donald N. McCloskey and now publishes as Deirdre N. McCloskey.

7 G. Thomas Goodnight, “Rhetoric and Communication: Alternative Worlds of Inquiry,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 146.

8 Forbes Hill, “Conventional Wisdom—Traditional Form—The President’s Message of November 3, 1969,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 58, no. 4 (1972): 373–86.

9 Goodnight, “Rhetoric and Communication,” 147.

10 John S. Nelson and Allan Megill, “Rhetoric of Inquiry: Projects and Prospects,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 72, no. 1 (1986): 31.

11 Donald N. McCloskey, “The Rhetoric of Economics,” Journal of Economic Literature 21, no. 2 (1983): 481–517.

12 Joshua S. Hanan, “From Economic Rhetoric to Economic Imaginaries: A Critical Genealogy of Economic Rhetoric in U.S. Communication Studies,” in Communication and the Economy: History, Value and Agency, ed. Joshua S. Hanan and Mark Hayward (New York: Peter Lang, 2014), 67–94; Hermann G. Stelzner, “Ford’s War on Inflation: A Metaphor that Did Not Cross,” Communication Monographs 44, no. 4 (1977): 284–97; David Zarefsky, “The Great Society as a Rhetorical Proposition,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 65, no. 4 (1979): 364–78.

13 McCloskey, “The Rhetoric of Economics,” 482.

14 Donald N. McCloskey, The Rhetoric of Economics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985).

15 Deirdre N. McCloskey, The Rhetoric of Economics, 2nd ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 3.

16 Ibid., 9.

17 Ibid., 36.

18 Ibid., 41–44.

19 Ibid., 151.

20 Hans-Herman Hoppe, “In Defense of Extreme Rationalism: Thoughts on Donald McCloskey’s The Rhetoric of Economics,” The Review of Austrian Economics 3 (1989): 179.

21 Ibid., 181.

22 Ibid., 183.

23 Donald N. McCloskey, “Splenetic Rationalism: Hoppe’s Review of Chapter 1 of The Rhetoric of Economics,” Market Process 7, no. 1 (1989): 34–41.

24 Ronald Walter Greene, “Another Materialist Rhetoric,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 15, no. 1 (1998): 21–40.

25 Andrew Rosenberg, “Rhetoric Is Not Important Enough for Economists to Bother About,” Economics and Philosophy 4, no. 1 (1988): 173 original emphasis.

26 Andrew Rosenberg, “Economics Is Too Important to be Left to the Rhetoricians,” Economics and Philosophy 4, no. 1 (1988): 129.

27 Ibid., 130 original emphasis.

28 Donald N. McCloskey, “Two Replies and a Dialogue on the Rhetoric of Economics: Mäki, Rappaport, and Rosenberg,” Economics and Philosophy 4, no. 1 (1988): 150–66.

29 McCloskey is working here to remind us that one may conduct empirical inquiry while not investing in empiricist epistemology.

30 McCloskey, The Rhetoric of Economics, 2nd ed., xii.

31 James Arnt Aune, Selling the Free Market: The Rhetoric of Economic Correctness (New York: Guilford Press, 2001).

32 A. M. Endres, “Adam Smith’s Rhetoric of Economics: An Illustration Using ‘Smithian’ Compositional Rules,” Scottish Journal of Political Economy 38, no. 1 (1991): 76–95.

33 William Rodney Herring and Mark Garrett Longaker, “Wishful, Rational, and Political Thinking: The Labor Theory of Value as Rhetoric,” Argumentation and Advocacy 50, no. 4 (2014): 193–209.

34 Mark Garrett Longaker, “Adam Smith on Rhetoric and Phronesis, Law and Economics,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 47, no. 1 (2014): 25–47.

35 Paul Turpin, The Moral Rhetoric of Political Economy: Justice and Modern Economic Thought (London: Routledge, 2011).

36 Josh Hanan, “The Moral Rhetoric of Political Economy: Justice and Modern Economic Thought. By Paul Turpin. New York: Routledge, 2011; pp. xv + 163. $115 cloth,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 15, no. 3 (2012): 549.

37 William Waller and Linda R. Robertson, “Why Johnny (Ph.D., Economics) Can’t Read: A Rhetorical Analysis of Thorstein Veblen and a Response to Donald McCloskey’s Rhetoric of Economics,” Journal of Economic Issues 24, no. 4 (1990): 1027–44.

38 Huascar F. Pessali, “The Rhetoric of Oliver Williamson’s Transaction Cost Economics,” Journal of Institutional Economics 2, no. 1 (2006): 45–65. Though scholars in the humanities largely gave up on the Cartesian subject some time ago, it lives on in homo economicus—the rational, self-knowing, endlessly optimizing consumer and producer of neoclassical economic theory.

39 David George, “The Rhetoric of Economics Texts,” Journal of Economic Issues 24, no. 3 (1990): 861–78.

40 Aune, Selling the Free Market, 178.

41 Catherine Chaput and Joshua S. Hannan, “Economic Rhetoric as Taxis: Neoliberal Governmentality and the Dispositif of Freakonomics,” Journal of Cultural Economy 8, no. 1 (2015): 42–61.

42 Joshua S. Hanan, Indradeep Ghosh, and Kaleb W. Brooks, “Banking on the Present: The Ontological Rhetoric of Neo-Classical Economics and Its Relation to the 2008 Financial Crisis,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 100, no. 2 (2014): 139–62.

43 Stelzner, “Ford’s War on Inflation.” Many heterodox economists note that inflation has myriad consequences, only some of which might be construed as undesirable by most. A decline in the purchasing power of money turns out to be helpful to the indebted. People who borrowed to fund their college education might be rather pleased to find out that, thanks to modest inflation, the cost of everything in the economy (including their own labor) has risen and their debt is now less onerous than it once was. Indeed, they might be inclined to consider what has happened as a shrinking of debts rather than inflation in prices. That we have been so roundly convinced to fear inflation suggests something about the rhetorical efficacy of capitalist discourse.

44 Ibid., 285.

45 Zarefsky, “The Great Society as a Rhetorical Proposition.”

46 I am thinking, especially, of the works of post-Marxists Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and Stuart Hall. This way of thinking about rhetoric as an articulatory practice found fuller expression in the field of communication studies in the works of Ronald Walter Greene and, later, Joshua S. Hanan.

47 Jessica Kuperavage, “Petitioning Against the ‘Opium Evil’: Economic Policy as Humanitarian Intervention in Early Antidrug Rhetoric,” Southern Communication Journal 79, no. 5 (2014): 369–86.

48 Philip Wander, “The Ideological Turn in Modern Criticism,” Central States Speech Journal 34, no. 1 (1983): 18.

49 Aune, Selling the Free Market.

50 Lawrence Grossberg, “Standing on a Bridge: Rescuing Economics From Economists,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 34, no. 4 (2010): 316.

51 Jillian Báez and Mari Castañeda, “Two Sides of the Same Story: Media Narratives of Latinos and the Subprime Mortgage Crisis,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 31, no. 1 (2014): 27–41; Catherine R. Squires, “Bursting the Bubble: A Case Study of Counter-framing in the Editorial Pages,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 28, no. 1 (2011): 30–49.

52 Megan Foley, “From Infantile Citizens to Infantile Institutions: The Metaphoric Transformation of Political Economy in the 2008 Housing Market Crisis,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 98, no. 4 (2012): 386–410.

53 Crystal Broch Colombini, “Speaking Confidence: Bubble Denial as Market Authoritative Rhetorical Decorum,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 45, no. 2 (2015): 117–37.

54 David G. Levasseur and Lisa M. Gring-Pemble, “Not All Capitalist Stories Are Created Equal: Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital Narrative and the Deep Divide in American Economic Rhetoric,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 18, no. 1 (2015): 1–38.

55 Jenny Edbauer Rice, “The New ‘New’: Making the Case for Critical Affect Studies,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 94, no. 2 (2008): 200–12. Rice observes that theorists imagine affect variously in terms of physiological phenomena; the production of ideology; the circulation of the economy; and as a linguistic effect.

56 Catherine Chaput, “The Rhetorical Situation and the Battle for Public Sentiment: How Friedman Overtook Galbraith at the Dawn of Neoliberalism,” in Communication and the Economy: History, Value and Agency, ed. Joshua S. Hanan and Mark Hayward (New York: Peter Lang, 2014), 187–208.

57 Ibid., 191.

58 Ibid., 192.

59 Barbara Biesecker, “Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation From Within the Thematic of Difference,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 22, no. 2 (1989): 110–30.

60 See Levasseur and Pemble, “Not All Capitalist Stories Are Created Equal”; Báez, and Castañeda, “Two Sides of the Same Story”; Squires, “Bursting the Bubble”; Aune, Selling the Free Market; Foley, “From Infantile Citizens to Infantile Institutions”; Chaput, “The Rhetorical Situation and the Battle for Public Sentiment”; Kuperavage, “Petitioning Against the ‘Opium Evil’”; Colombini, “Speaking Confidence.”

61 Here I am extending the critique Chaput and Hanan level at Aune in “Economic Rhetoric as Taxis.” An orthodox Marxist, Aune seemed to imagine that rhetoric is to be differentiated from the actual economy (and all of the kinds of exploitation and oppression that happen inside of it), which exists as a thing in itself.

62 Ronald Walter Greene, “Rhetoric and Capitalism: Rhetorical Agency as Communicative Labor,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 37, no. 3 (2004): 202, qtd. in Chaput and Hanan, “Economic Rhetoric as Taxis,” 21.

63 Davis W. Houck, “Rhetoric as Currency: Herbert Hoover and the 1929 Stock Market Crash,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 3, no. 2 (2000): 155–81.

64 Ibid., 159 original emphases.

65 James A. McVey, “Recalibrating the State of the Union: Visual Rhetoric and the Temporality of Neoliberal Economics in the 2011 Enhanced State of the Union Address,” POROI 11, no. 2 (2015): 1–24.

66 Timothy Johnson, “Paving the Way to Prosperity: Ford Motor Company’s Films, Interstitial Rhetoric, and the Production of Economic Space in the Interwar Period,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 45, no. 5 (2016): 434–58.

67 Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Ian Cunnison (London: Cohen & West, 1966); Paul Fussell, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983); Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); Arjun Appadurai, ed., “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 3–63.

68 Deirdre N. McCloskey, “The Rhetoric of the Economy and the Polity,” Annual Review of Political Science 14, no. 1 (2011): 181–99.

69 Grossberg, “Standing on a Bridge,” 317.

70 G. Thomas Goodnight, David Hingstman, and Sandy Green, “The Student Debt Bubble: Neoliberalism, the University, and Income Inequality,” Journal of Cultural Economy 8, no. 1 (2015): 75–100; G. Thomas Goodnight and Sandy Green, “Rhetoric, Risk, and Markets: The Dot-Com Bubble,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 96, no. 2 (2010): 115–40.

71 Dana L. Cloud, “The Materialist Dialectic as a Site of Kairos: Theorizing Rhetorical Intervention in Material Social Relations,” in Rhetoric, Materiality, and Politics, ed. Barbara A. Biesecker and John Luis Lucaites (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 293–319.

72 Fiona Allon, “Everyday Leverage, or Leveraging the Everyday,” Cultural Studies 29, no. 5–6 (2015): 687–706.

73 Cathy O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (New York: Crown, 2016).

74 PdF YouTube, “Cathy O’Neil | Weapons of Math Destruction,” YouTube.com, June 7, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdCJYsKlX_Y.

75 Tom Slee, What’s Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy (New York: OR Books, 2016).

76 Mark Hayward, “Political Economy and Cultural Studies: Methodological Reflections on The Economic in U.S. Communication Studies,” in Communication and the Economy: History, Value and Agency, ed. Joshua S. Hanan and Mark Hayward (New York: Peter Lang, 2014), 21–43.

77 Joshua S. Hanan, “Home Is Where the Capital Is: The Culture of Real Estate in an Era of Control Societies,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 7, no. 2 (2010): 176–201.

78 Greg Dickinson, Suburban Dreams: Imagining and Building the Good Life (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2015).

79 Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver, A Mathematical Model of Communication (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1949).

80 Ferdinand de Saussure, “Course in General Linguistics,” in Literary Theory: An Anthology, 2nd ed., ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1988), 59–71.

81 Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” trans. Richard Nice, in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. John G. Richardson (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 241–58.

82 Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).

83 James Arnt Aune, “From Corax to Coase: Rhetoric and Rational Choice Theory,” in Communication and the Economy: History, Value and Agency, ed. Joshua S. Hanan and Mark Hayward (New York: Peter Lang, 2014), 95–120.

84 Greene, “Rhetoric and Capitalism,” 198.

85 William Rodney Herring and Mark Garrett Longaker, “Rhetoric as Economics: Samuel Newman and David Jayne Hill on the Problem of Representation,” Rhetoric Review 31, no. 3 (2012): 236–53.

86 Martin Schiralli and Nathalie Sinclair, “A Constructive Response to ‘Where Mathematics Comes From,’” Educational Studies in Mathematics 52, no. 1 (2003): 79–91.

87 Philip Mirowski, “Shall I Compare Thee to a Minkowski-Ricardo-Leontief-Metzler Matrix of the Mosak-Hicks Type? Or Rhetoric, Mathematics, and the Nature of Neoclassical Economic Theory,” Economics and Philosophy 3, no. 1 (1987): 67–96.

88 John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (New York: Holt, 1927); Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989); Walter R. Fisher, “Narration as a Human Communication Paradigm: The Case of Public Moral Argument,” Communication Monographs 51, no. 1 (1984): 1–22; G. Thomas Goodnight, “The Personal, Technical, and Public Spheres of Argument: A Speculative Inquiry into the Art of Public Deliberation,” Argumentation and Advocacy 48, no. 4 (2012): 198–210.