McCloskey’s Rhetoric: Discourse Ethics in Economics
Benjamin Balak, Routledge, 2006, 142 pages, £65.00.
Deirdre McCloskey has, for many years, been engaged in a project of challenging mainstream economics. At the level of economic method this challenge focuses on the over-concentration on formal (mathematical) models, the confusion of statistical significance with economic significance in empirical work, and the positivist conception of economics as a form of social engineering. At the level of economic methodology and the philosophy of science the challenge is a form of the post-modern challenge to ‘scientific’ orthodoxy. Together these themes form the basis of McCloskey’s view of economics as rhetoric, where economics (like other disciplines) must be seen as a continuing conversation in which the participants try to persuade each other (and others), and where the criteria of persuasiveness emerge from within the discourse. This is in contrast to the strict positivist conception that the rules of ‘scientific’ method, involving ‘proofs’ and ‘facts’ that are objective and external to any particular area of study or discipline. Equally, the study of the discipline of economics (ie the study of economic methodology or the ‘philosophy of economics’) is, in McCloskey’s view, best seen as a branch of the sociology of knowledge, rather than itself being ‘scientific’.
McCloskey’s views are controversial among methodologists and philos¬ophers of economics, although the impact of the controversy on practical economics is by no means obvious. This book presents a discussion of the controversy that is broadly sympathetic to the McCloskey position. However, those of a more practical disposition should be warned that the discussion moves quickly away from the concerns of economic method in the direction of methodology and meta-theory (and even meta-meta-theory). Perhaps the two dominant themes of the book (after an explication of McCloskey’s position) are the review of a debate between McCloskey and Uskali Maki that came to a head in 1995, and the attempt to place McCloskey in the more general post-modern debate on epistemology – where a key issue is the idea of ‘truth’ and the role that ‘truth’ may play in our concept of ‘knowledge’.
Balak clearly, and rightly, distances McCloskey from naïve or nihilist versions of post-modernism which might be read as saying that there is no such thing as absolute truth and that any method of study is as valid (or invalid) as any other. Rather, Balak suggests that McCloskey offers a moderate or pragmatic post-modernism which merely seeks to view truth as relative to a particular context, and where a range of different approaches may contribute. But no real attempt is made to bring the discussion back down to the level of actual economic method where at least some discussion of the practical implications of the recommended view would have been helpful. How, for example, do the criticisms of ‘mainstream’ economic methodology apply to leading figures in policy debates such as Joseph Stiglitz or Paul Krugman? Without such practical application, this book will be read almost entirely by specialists in methodology, and so will not persuade many actual economists.
Alan Hamlin
University of Manchester |