The Rhetoric of Economics

Front Cover
Univ of Wisconsin Press, May 15, 1998 - Social Science - 248 pages

A classic in its field, this pathbreaking book humanized the scientific rhetoric of economics to reveal its literary soul. Economics needs to admit that it, like other sciences, works with metaphors and stories. Its most mathematical and statistical moments are properly dominated by comparison and narration, that is to say, human persuasion. The book was McCloskey's opening move in the development of a "humanomics," and unification of the sciences and the humanities on the field of ordinary business life.

 

Contents

1 How to do a Rhetorical Analysis of Economics and Why
3
2 The Literary Character of Economic Science
20
3 Figures of Economic Speech
35
How John Muth Persuades
52
Robert Fogel As Rhetor
74
6 The Lawyerly Rhetoric of Coases The Nature of the Firm
87
7 The Unexamined Rhetoric of Economic Quantification
100
8 The Rhetioric of Significance Tests
112
9 The Poverty of Economic Modernism
139
10 From Methodoloy to Rhetoric
156
11 AntiRhetoric
168
Prospects for a Scientific Economics
187
Bibliography
195
Index
219
Copyright

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About the author (1998)

Deirdre N. McCloskey is the UIC Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

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