Rhetoric and Economics, Analysis and History

Abstract

In the 1980s, Deirdre McCloskey argued that economists should look beyond their mathematical formulas and their positivist methodologies. If “economic style appeals in various ways to an ethos worthy of belief,” then economists should “give up their quaint modernism and open themselves to a wider range of discourse… . [They should] examine their language in action and converse more politely with others in the conversation of humanity” (McCloskey Rhetoric, 11, 167). Much broader than her original “rhetoric of economics,” McCloskey’s recent “humanomics,” asks us to consider cultural as well as economic forces when investigating human prosperity (Bourgeois, 553–559). McCloskey’s humanomics is one example of the rhetoric of economics clearing the way for new scholarly efforts in the social sciences. The articles in this special collection move in another direction, towards rhetorical analysis and historical inquiry. Like McCloskey’s humanomics, the historical inquiry into rhetoric and economics is a worthy sequel to McCloskey’s pioneering efforts.Robert McDonald’s “From “Incentive Furie” to “Incentives to Efficiency,” or the Movement of “Incentive” in Neoclassical Thought,” for instance, rhetorically analyzes works by Jeremy Bentham, Alfred Marshall, and Paul Samuelson. Echoing McCloskey’s rhetoric of economics, McDonald suggests a modest disciplinary conclusion about the rhetorical constitution of economic science. He notes the “poetical” quality of incentives, their “call to act rationally,” and their rhetorically objectified constitution as “the desired object that provides the key to unlocking a universal analysis of social reality” (this issue). But, instead of drawing conclusions about the discipline of economics or rhetoric’s economic function, McDonald asks: What does poetically constituted “incentive” do in our common conversations and our daily deliberations? The “rhetoric of economics” was a critical inquiry, part of the larger Project on the Rhetoric of Inquiry that McCloskey and others began (1980) at the University of Iowa. McCloskey’s humanomics is a human science including cultural criticism, philosophical rumination, and statistical formulas. McDonald’s critical analysis of economic arguments is an historical inquiry into the local constitution and the specific function of public discourse. Like McDonald, the authors featured in this special issue share McCloskey’s two key insights. We all agree that economics is rhetorically constituted, and rhetoric is economically effective. But we attend to specific arguments, their rhetorical form, and their historical function.McDonald’s essay traces a common rhetorical turn across two centuries of argumentation. The first major segment of his argument explores the etymology of “incentive,” showing that the anthimeric movement from adjective to noun happened simultaneously in university hallways and vulgar conversations. Samuelson wasn’t the only twentieth-century voice chattering about “incentives.” We all were. McDonald’s etymology follows the evolution of a rhetorical commonplace. His analysis highlights its social effects: “the supersession of society by the economy” (this issue). He concludes with a question about contemporary policies. “[W]hat is repressed, negated, and transformed when incentives become a universal object”? (this issue).McDonald’s “incentive” has a centuries-old pedigree. Other topics of economic argumentation seem less senescent. In his contribution to this special issue, William O. Saas charts an important shift in U.S. presidential rhetoric: from the Keynesian definition of federal debt (a way to support publicly favored economic initiatives) to the neoliberal definition of a balanced budget (an eternal moral good, irrespective of federal obligations or economic imperatives). The analogy between the U.S. federal budget and a family’s finances became widespread during national conversations about Reaganite supply-side economics. The “pump priming” and “printing money” metaphors (both describing federal deficit spending during a recession) seem no older than the Federal Reserve System (1913). Yet the lines of argument that Saas analyzes have a long history.Writing in 1695, Secretary to the Treasury of Great Britain under William III, William Lowndes bickered with mercantilists who defined the balance of trade as a moral good. They further opposed revaluation of English specie (the early-modern version of “printing money”) on the grounds that such an action would lead to inflation. Mercantilists believed that England’s monetary problems could only be rectified by correcting the balance of trade and attracting foreign silver to English shores. Lowndes conceded his opponents’ definition, allowing that “the Ballance [sic] of Trade must be Rectified” (91). Exactly ten years later, based on a proto-Keynesian definition of federal debt, John Law (of Mississippi Company fame) suggested that the Scottish government allow monetization of land titles, essentially “printing money” to spur domestic industry. According to Law, “[a]n addition to the money adds to the value of the country, so long as money gives interest, it is imployed [sic]; and money imployed brings profit” (21–22). There are some important differences, of course, between the twentieth-century arguments that Saas analyzes and their seventeenth-century analogues. Saas looks at the Reaganite argument that a balanced budget, not balanced trade, is a moral good. And John Law may have presaged the Keynesian pump-priming metaphor, but he did not take the argument as far as the neo-Keynesians whom Saas favors. Nonetheless, this quick comparison shows a line of economic rhetoric stretching from seventeenth-century monetary arguments to twentieth-century fiscal disagreements.I do not have to demonstrate a storied legacy for the economic arguments that William Rodney Herring analyzes because he starts in the early eighteenth century. Herring’s historical scope aside, “Neither Pistols nor Sugar-Plumbs: The Rhetoric of Finance and the 1720 Bubbles” offers something else to the study of economic rhetoric: an attention to financial instruments as persuasive devices. Herring claims that early eighteenth-century offers to buy stocks at rates above or below par (face-value, as distinct from market value) were a kind of symbolic action, an effort to influence buyers’ choices by changing their perceptions. Herring’s contribution is twofold. In an analytical register, he contends that financial instruments themselves are rhetorical. In an historical register, he notes that financial instruments have historically held a rhetorical function. His analysis leads to contemporary political questions, not unlike those raised by McDonald and Saas. Herring asks, What persuasive force do financial instruments exert? McDonald ponders, How did Bentham’s anthimeria change into Samuelson’s common sense? Saas wonders, How have we defined credit and debt? While exploring common lines of economic argumentation, some explicitly discursive and others implicitly persuasive, all three articles indulge a wide historical scope and allow some political reflection.The remaining three articles in this collection, by contrast, present robust political implications supported by some historical reflection. The shared mix of history and advocacy—inquiry and argument—characterizes the new historical inquiry into rhetoric and economics.Joshua S. Hanan and Jeffrey St. Onge discuss the common antithesis between Wall Street and Main Street in their analysis of the 2015 movie The Big Short. Hanan and St. Onge point to a more fundamental antithesis between the oikos and the polis, arguing that the ancient Greeks privileged the polis, seeing the oikos as a “supplementary background” and the polis as “a sovereign domain of action” (this issue). Their genealogical inquiry reveals that moderns have reconfigured this order. The metonymic “Main Street” recedes into the background, while “Wall Street” becomes a “sphere of emergent freedom and autarky” (this issue). Hanan and St. Onge scrutinize an antithesis, adulating one economic class and its privileged sphere of activity while relegating the other to inconsequence.Such rhetorical antithesis, however, is neither peculiar to present-day finance, nor specific to modish Hollywood. Two moments remind us that the antithesis discussed by Hanan and St. Onge can be found in the infancy and midlife of modern economic argumentation. In late seventeenth-century England, land-owning gentry imagined their agricultural sphere as the productive arena where political action should take place, and they sneered at new financiers who invented financial instruments such as the Million Lottery Act and the Bank of England (1694). Like many English mercantilists and French Physiocrats, John Briscoe assumed that the truly “productive” sphere was agriculture, so the empowered political class should be the noble “Landed-Men,” not the usurious “monied-men” (19). He juxtaposed a privileged, agricultural, and aristocratic polis against the nonproductive (financial) oikos. Briscoe’s argument is classical in form, repeated through the ages, separating a productive from an unproductive sphere and depending on class interest. Two-and-a-half centuries later, John Maynard Keynes argued that global bankers had become a privileged class, global finance a dominant polis, to the detriment of the industrial oikos. Like the Wall Street/Main Street opposition, Keynes’s rentier/producer antithesis asserts an injustice, this time with the rentier unfairly in the privileged sphere and the manufacturer all but erased. According to Keynes, gradually eliminating interest (making “capital goods so abundant that the marginal efficiency of capital is zero”), would likewise eliminate “many of the objectionable features of capitalism.” Full employment would result from low (effectively zero) interest rates. The “rentier,” no longer able to make a living, would vanish. Entrepreneurial industrialists would become the properly privileged class. “[T]here would still be room … for enterprise and skill in the estimation of prospective yields” (221), so industry would become the new polis.I point to a long history behind the antithesis that Hanan and St. Onge locate in their contemporary analysis. But I want to emphasize that they find something more than a tired rhetorical juxtaposition of warring classes. Their genealogy explains that rhetorical activity is invested in the privileged polis (Wall Street) while the ambient background of necessity (Main Street) remains. They are analyzing an old trope while explaining its new turn, its contemporary economic effects. They add a new awareness: the dialectical structure of the oikos and the polis (Main Street and Wall Street) excludes the oikos; the rhetorical form diminishes Main Street’s agency. Something similar can be said about the topics discussed in Catherine Chaput’s and Crystal Broch Colombini’s articles. While Chaput and Colombini seek out old lines of economic argumentation, they find much more than tired commonplaces applied to present circumstances.Chaput and Colombini analyze supplemental arguments that shore up the economist’s dryly rational proof. Again, the historical precedence is not hard to find. Thomas Malthus’ demographic arguments inspired Thomas Carlyle’s oft-repeated characterization of economics: “the dismal science.” Harriet Martineau supplemented Malthus’s tomes about cyclical overpopulation and famine. She created characters who embodied rational prudence while suffering economic hardship. In one of Martineau’s Illustrations of Political Economy (1832–1834), Ella of Garveloch, a rich literary character, wisely steers her family through a wretched famine. Surrounded by suffering, she proclaims, in terms far more convincing than anything Malthus ever mouthed, “Evil is palliated by the caution of the prudent, by the emigration of the enterprising, and by other means which may yet remain” (102). Martineau’s characters are ethical arguments about how people should behave once they understand rational principles, such as “the operation of the principle of increase within narrow bounds” (Martineau 103). Ayn Rand, writing a century later, offered pathetic appeals to supplement the arid libertarian arguments of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Rand even theorized the necessity of her pathetic supplement, saying that her nakedly pro-capitalist novels were meant to emotionally convey a “sense of life” to a reader who would then induce “an intense, profoundly personal … value-meaning,” a meaning that might be deduced rationally but without the force of conviction (35). We could reason our way toward a belief in the free market, said Rand, or we could gaze upon the “artist’s view of man” (67), a sculpted Howard Roark or a daring Dagny Taggart. Rand and Martineau shared the belief that pathetic and ethical argumentation supplements rational economic deduction. Colombini’s and Chaput’s analyses present the ethical and the emotional appeals as not merely supplemental to the economic claim but rather as integral to the political economy.Colombini analyzes a moral argument commonly repeated during the recent housing market collapse. As she explains, the economist’s wholly rational definition of “strategic default” explains why a prudent person possessing an underwater mortgage should simply forfeit the property. But such rational action, if widespread, would harm banks and might cripple the financial sector. As a result, in public discourse, an ethically supplemental definition was added: Mortgage holders were said to be “walking away” from their homes and their responsibilities. The Martineau and Rand examples suggest that economic arguments require an ethical and pathetic sugarcoating to sweeten the rational pill. Colombini’s analysis of “walking away” suggests that the supplement is more than decoration. Without these moral public arguments, “rational” neoliberalism would not function. Rendered unpersuasive by its own cold ratiocination and unsustainable by its victims’ rational actions, neoliberalism depends upon the rhetorical strategies that Colombini discusses.Chaput explores Donald Trump’s economic arguments. She explains that an irrational and inconsistent Trumponomics mobilizes affect, that fluttery sensitivity and jittery responsivity energized by social media, image ads, and wearable technology. Working “along ontological axes,” Chaput illuminates a new pathetic appeal in a new rhetorical role (this issue). Trump’s pathos does not supplement his rational appeal. His affect is the argument. The “epistemic focus of the rhetoric of economic arguments” emphasized logos. Chaput picks up where McCloskey left off, by analyzing the affectively suasive dimension. Understanding affect requires Chaput’s “ontological focus” (this issue). Rand and Martineau offered ethical and pathetic supplements. Colombini and Chaput theorize ethical and pathetic economics. Aristotle once observed that rhetoric must appeal to the whole person. Chaput and Colombini suggest that our present-day economy enlists every felt conviction and mobilizes every bodily corpuscle. Like all persuasive efforts, rational economic theory requires ethical and pathetic appeals. Colombini and Chaput add to the classical maxim a contemporary reflection: Economic systems cannot survive without economic argumentation. Chaput directly states this when remarking that the neoliberal economy itself, like Trump’s zigzagging affective appeals, “not only moves in a decidedly nonlinear path, it produces a bodily thinking” (this issue). Affect is not just a rhetorical appeal; it’s a bio-political factory and an economic engine.At the twentieth century’s close, Deirdre McCloskey averred that the rhetoric of economics was not “intrinsically revolutionary or intrinsically conservative” (Knowledge 339). Her last and longest book, before the bourgeois virtue trilogy, circled back to a methodological conclusion: “Perhaps the time has come, after a useful childhood spent in positivism, for economists to grow up too” (Knowledge 396). While the authors featured in this special issue often separate their approach to economic rhetoric from McCloskey’s rhetoric of economics, they all owe her a significant debt. Once she had cleared the positivist brush, other inquiries, such has her humanomics, could take seed. Like McCloskey’s initial and most recent program, the articles in this special issue require neither a neo-Marxian nor a neo-Keynesian tilt. Nonetheless, the historical analysis of economic rhetoric requires that we engage politics. Two decades ago, when she proclaimed her partisan neutrality, McCloskey was dodging typical accusations of postmodern relativism and radical nihilism, the alleged epistemological bedfellows of socialism, communism, and anarchism. Critically analyzing economic arguments can similarly avoid a partisan but not a political tilt. Historically situating and tracing economic arguments recalls an older paradigm—political economy—a paradigm that refused to separate public discourse from social science or partisan bickering from expert advice. In this introduction, I have argued that all the arguments analyzed in this special issue have long historical traditions. But more than these traditions of economic argumentation, the refusal to throw out the political baby with the positivist bathwater makes the contributions to this special issue properly rhetorical, fully humanist, and thoroughly historical.