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(No part of this re/inter/view discussion may be published elsewhere without written permission from victor j. vitanza and the individual posters.) --Full Copyright notice is at the end of each file.
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The PreText List will hold a Re/In/View with Deirdre N. McCloskey, beginning June, 1998. The subject of conversation will be Deirdre's The Rhetoric of Economics (U of Wisconsin P, 1998). | 2/e |
Announcement, next re/inter/view ...this is an early announcement of the next reinvw, which we expect to start in June. ...our next reinvw will be with Deirdre N. McCloskey. we will discuss the second edition of _The Rhetoric of Economics_ (forthcoming, May 1998). ...in the meatime if you have not read the first edition, you might re/read it. the second edition has three new chapters. we will be focusing our discussion on both editions. you might also be interested in reading McCloskey's recent book, _The Vices of Economists_. ...if i can be of any assistants, please drop me a personal note. and please feel free to post on any issues of rhetorical-theoretical-pedagogical interests that you might have. best, vv
On 2/16/98 2:38 PM, vv is rumored to have written:
...our next reinvw will be with Deirdre N. McCloskey. we will discuss the second edition of _The Rhetoric of Economics_ (forthcoming, May 1998). Victor, Don't you mean *Donald* N. McCloskey. Cheers, Jim
Ha, ha, ha!!! Is he in for a surprise! Deirdre On Mon, 16 Feb 1998, J. Comas wrote:
On 2/16/98 2:38 PM, vv is rumored to have written:
Jim writes: Victor, This is going to be phun. :) ddd
Jim, Nope, it's Donald cum Deirdre. For more info, you might check out the 2/6 edition of The Chronicle, "Academe's Transgender Movement," p. A10. joan
On 2/16/98 3:49 PM, D. McCloskey is rumored to have written:
Ha, ha, ha!!! Is he in for a surprise! Well, somebody's got to be surprised! Looking forward to what promises to be a fascinating re/inter/view. Cheers, Jim
Deirdre, Let's begin with the covers. The 2/e has a new one. For those subscribers who do not have both editions: There's a reproduction of the 1/e and 2/e covers at http://www.pre-text.com/ptlist/mccloskey1.html (Above) On the previous cover, there is the vertical reproduction of the U.S. dollar bill, over which is superimposed a figure of a "man," which the dust jacket says is "courtesy of Historical Pictures Service, Chicago." I have several guesses as to whom this "man" is, but I will not 'venture' them here. (The figure is a wonderful empty cipher, as is the dollar bill!) On the new, much darker cover, there is in the background a balance sheet, over which is lightly and horizontally superimposed the U.S. dollar bill, but over which is grandly imposed the-dollar-bill image of George Washington, but with the mouth of a marionette. Wonderful fetishes. Most likely you had no say about the cover design. I was wondering, however, _____What your thoughts might be about that which "covers" your words? vv
victor j. vitanza
Covers are, as you know, seldom much at choice by the author. The recent one has George Washington with a Monty-Python-type mouth in the act of talking, so: talking-dollar bill-rhetoric-economics: get it? At least that is what I think the artist had in mind. I was worried that it would spoof my gender change, as an earlier version of the cover was going to--not with hostile intent, of course. I wanted them to go Dignified, to lean against the tendency to sneer that my gender change might evoke. This one's OK with me. The British edition of the book had Milton Friedman orating, which I had no say on. Still, I don't mind. I might as well come out right away as What I Am: a Chicago-School economist, a colleague of Milton's once, a free market feminist. My main beef about the book is that Wisconsin insists on sending copies to bookstores with shrinkwrap on them. (More exactly, they won't take back excess copies without the wrap.) It makes it impossible to examine the book in the store. I just heard a nice reading from an anthology of life stories of gay men with farm backgrounds, Farm Boys. Very affecting. Stack of books to sell, all shrinkwrapped. Publisher? U of Wisc, natch. I stood there and removed the shrinkwrap on the spot, in solidarity with another victim of the U of Wisc's shrinkwrapping machine. Sorry to get so weird so quickly. Regards, Deirdre
But since you said Deirdre would prefer if I kept it short (which surely wouldn't have anything to do with her becoming a woman), I shall try my best (since I'm rushing to the P.O. to buy some Ben Franklins before intervention-buoyed Fukuzawa sinks again). So here's a few opening questions: ______What do you mean, in your best layperson's terms, by "free market feminist," or what is a free market feminist's economic point of view? ______What do you perceive are the differences in your audience between your preface to the second edition and the body, shall we say, of your text? Or what assumptions did you make about "authority," "obscurity," or "rhetorical intentions" concerning what a preface can say and what "analysis" should say when you seemingly changed your style between the preface and the body/analysis? Or it a matter of what you've revised and what you haven't, since you seem to come back to the same style at the end? Here I confess, I haven't entirely waded through the middle yet, lost in a sea of names and terms that--even as you tried to make them accessible--don't exactly come up on my mutual fund statements for dummy-dipshits. As a rhetorician/creative writer/lover of language (who has an economic interest in retiring early as a hippie), I was delighted by your preface--By George (since he seems to be the man of the hour), I think I'll get it!--and came away thinking surely you must have been a gay man or one of the campiest straight men I have read (which would now make you either one of the campiest lesbians or straight women I have read) and thought, Love the hat, love the bag, love the shoes, I can't wait. But then the "real work" began and I found myself asking, Where, oh where, has my Aunt Deirdre gone? So perhaps you could expound a bit on your own rhetorical stylistic choices. Yours in sisterhood from less than free market, but wonderfully safe and predominately economically equal (or boringly middle-class, if you insist) Japan, Dana
I am a Ph.D. student at New Mexico State University in rhetoric and professional communication. I have a master's from UT El Paso in economics. These combined interests obviously have drawn me to your work and the work of Arjo Klamer and fellow sympathizers. Thank you for opening this door of philosophical and academic exploration for me and others to pass through. _____I wonder if you would agree with the oft-quoted remark of rhetorician Alan Gross, who said something to the effect that "science is rhetoric without remainder?" Your work would seem to support his comment, especially in your assertions that positivism is "impoverished" and, in some cases, serves no purpose but to assert the mathematical pedigree of the neo-classical club members. "Rhetoric is good for you," as you say in The Rhetoric of Economics, implying that it is necessary in economics. But is it sufficient? Is there any "remainder," anything that is outside the realm of rhetoric, anything left for the pure quant-jocks? If economics is all rhetoric and rhetoric is "antimethodolgy" (p. 51 1/e), how then are economists to conduct themselves? How can they develop the grist for civil conversations without method, albeit imperfect and biased? Without a systematic effort to organize and evaluate knowledge, it seems economics would become entirely a normative endeavor. Fine, except isnšt there then the danger that economics as rhetoric without remainder would become ethics without foundations? Normative economists freed of methodology would have license to sling around deliberative arguments warranted by concepts that have never been tested, have never been defined, have never been hewn by the flames of careful, methodological contemplation. To me, it seems the tension now extant between positivism and normativism in economics is healthy, just as the tension between dialectic (truth-seeking methodology) and rhetoric (persuasive sophistry) was healthy for the polis of Ancient Greece--even when such tension breeds occasional moments of rancor. Thanks for reading, Ken Baake
People: Dana asked,
>______What do you mean, in your best layperson's terms, by "free market A lot of things. One is that the state is unlikely to be nice to women, since it is run by men. For example, the wave of "protective" legislation in the US in the early 20th century, it is now pretty much agreed by historians (not all), stunted careers for women in management. Further, traditional socialism was and a lot of modern offsprings still are guys' outfits. I remember back in the anti-War movement letting the girls make the coffee. Exclusively. And the market is often the source of liberation for women. That's how the young women who went from farm to mill in early 19th-century Massachusetts viewed it, for example: the wage was a release from father and domestic servitude. But don't get me started!
>______What do you perceive are the differences in your audience between I didn't so thoroughly revise the middle, through which you flatteringly describe yourself "wading"! I was trying to get a new audience, mainly as I say in the postscript the graduate students in Econ, lost souls.
>came away thinking surely you must have been a gay man or No, oddly, I was straight, and nothing like campy. My mother HATES my "new" style. Though for her generation nothing like a homophobe, she is made very uncomfortable by campiness. I like it, and will go on wearing purple and running my umbrella along the fence posts, thank you very much!
>thought, Love the hat, love the bag, love the shoes, I can't wait. But then As I say, they were choices made within a constraint that I didn't have time to revise the book thoroughly, top to bottom, in Deirdre's style. I'm still exploring my voice. It's a little like changing countries; or for that matter social classes. Love, Tante Deirdre
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| An Excursus ... extending Deirdre's response to Dana's concern about the rewrites of the second edition: The following might be a helpful narratological (expositological ?) analysis of the two editions. --VV | |
| First Edition ....... | Second Editon .......... |
| 1. The Poverty of Economic Modernism | 1. How To Do a Rhetorical Analysis of Economics, and Why |
| 2. From Methodology to Rhetoric | 2. The Literary Character of Economic Science |
| 3. Anti-Anti-Rhetoric | 3. Figures of Economic Speech |
| 4. The Literary Character of Economic Science | 4. The Rhetoric of Scientism |
| 5. Figures of Economic Speech | 5. The Problem of Audience in Historical Economics |
| 6. The Rhetoric of Scientism | 6. The Lawyerly Rhetoric of Coase's "The Nature of the Firm" |
| 7. The Problem of Audience in Historical Economics | 7. The Unexamined Rhetoric of Economic Quantification |
| 8. The Unexamined Rhetoric of Economic Quantification | 8. The Rhetoric of Significance Tests |
| 9. The Rhetoric of Significance Tests | 9. The Poverty of Economic Modernism |
| 10. The Good of Rhetoric in Economics | 10. From Methodology to Rhetoric |
| ----- | 11. Anti-Anti-Rhetoric |
| ----- | 12. Since Rhetoric: Prospects for a Scientific Economics |
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Plotting of chapters in 1/e |
C.1 | C.2 | C.3 | C.4 | C.5 | C.6 | C.7 | C.8 | C.9 | C.10 |
| Chapter 1 becomes Chapter 9, 2 becomes 10, etc. | ||||||||||
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Replotting of 2/e |
C.9 | C.10 | C.11 | C.2 | C.3 | C.4 | C.5 | C.7 | C.8 | --- |
Note that chap. 10 is omitted and that chap. 3 becomes a new chapter (11).
Including all the old and new chapters in the 2/e, we get the following sequence:
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Plotting of chapters in 2/e |
C.1 New |
C.2 was C.4 |
C.3 was C.5 |
C.4 was C.6 |
C.5 was C.7 |
C.6 New |
C.7 was C.8 |
C.8 was C.9 |
C.9 was C.1 |
C.10 was C.2 |
C.11 was C.3 |
C.12 was omitted yet implied throughout |
Looking at this analysis, What do you see in terms of a change in strategy?
Immediately what comes to my mind is that there is a new chapter at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end; and that there is a gluing of these new additions together with the old chapters by way of a quasi-'in medias res.'
Deirdre, in the Preface to the 2/e, partially answers the question:
Arrangement has never been my strong suit as a rhetorician, and I arranged the book [1/e] badly. Specifically, I opened it badly. A lot of people thought that the main point of the book was contained in the opening complaint about positivism and its wider context, 'modernism.' After all, the first three chapters in the first edition were 'philosophical.' ... What's the point? As I said: that economics is literary.... The point was obscured by the organization of the book. Most reviewers did not read beyond the third chapter, quite rightly--I mean, how much of this amateur philosophy are you supposed to put up with? [...] I've added an opening chapter that gets right down to work, 'How to Do a Rhetorical Analysis of Economics, and Why,'.... (xii)
She opens in the second edition strategically from the literary (poetic, rhetorical) aspect of economics to the philosophical, emphasizing the former over the latter. In Medias Res. As Hans Kellner might tell us, Deirdre has retold her story "crooked" (Language and Historical Representation: Getting the Story Crooked. Wisconsin UP, 1989). At least, it's crooked at the macro-level! As Deirdre suggests in response to Dana's question concerning style, she is still developing, at a mico-level, a new voice for a new style.
Dear Prof. Harper,
> -------Do you see your book or others written under the lens of Rhet. of The queenly role of Philosophy is Plato's idea, not Bertie's, yes? (20th century philosophy tried, and failed, to privilege mathematics, by way of formal logic.) I mention it because, yes, the point of rhetoric of inquiry and of my book is to reclaim a wider realm of rhetoric. In the rhetoric of inquiry we try to work from within the disciplines, finding from insider knowledge of how things actually work in, say, economics that even the most disciplined speech is rhetorical--not some other (non-existent) realm of Proof. This is not so shocking if you think of proof as rhetoric of persuasion, and think of non-Euclidean geometry and the proof theorists of the 1930s as showing, as Reuben Hersh says in his nice popular books on math, that mathematics is persuasive.
> > or, another way of asking this, > Yes, though I'd urge you to think of it as a wider point than just our point at Iowa's Project on Rhetoric of Inquiry: it is what Kuhn and his intellectual children have been saying these thirty or forty years; or Feyerabend; or Finochiarro; or Wayne Booth; or wider still back to the sophists. The "it" is: The claim within a discipline of having already every argument worth making is perhaps psychologically necessary for people to specialize (an economist who takes seriously sociology or literary criticism is going to have a hard time learning price theory, at least the way it's presently taught); but it has no epistemological dignity. It's a political move of normal science. We Kuhnians think it's funny. Let me be concrete: Modern American political science. Funnier you cannot get. Across the country deans are trying to close down Communications departments, but wouldn't think of closing down Political Science, which is a Discipline. It makes one laugh: it's only a decade or so older in American academic life as a separate department; it, unlike Communications, does not study what it claims to study (viz., politics); and its "scientific" rhetoric, such as its uncritical adoption of rational choice theory from economics and its pathetic confusion about the meaning of statistical significance, is tremendous fun. Yet the politics of scholarship is such that a mainly midwestern field like Communications gets low status and a mainly coastie field like Political Science gets appointments.
> >
> research to describe a certain phennomenon, as we might say that Bruno Here we disagree, though I believe at the end we won't. Of course we should privilege rhetoric. Why? Because it is catastrophically underprivileged now, and has been since the 17th century. The underprivileging leaves us helpless against thugs of various sorts. On this point Richard Lanham (The Electronic Word) is eloquent; and Wayne Booth earlier. > > > On Covers--- >
> Also, I started thinking of "cover" in the musical sense, that is, to I like that image. I've reclothed the book, adding an attractive scarf here, a nice pin there. (It shows the problem with not privileging rhetoric that one will be inclined to say, "Oh, just cosmetic." Surface is not the only substance, but its part, sometimes as in science a large part.) Sincerely, Deirdre McCloskey
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