Ideas, Virtues and the Bourgeois Deal: McCloskey’s Rhetoric of Economics Reasserted
Year: 2023
Type: article
Abstract: Deirdre N. McCloskey’s contributions to Economics cover a wide range of topics, includingstudies in Economic History, Methodology, Language and Ethics. Her most recentcollection of studies, the Bourgeois Trilogy (2006, 2010a and 2016a), substantiates thisinterdisciplinarity by bringing these fields together to reassess the history of the ModernWorld. The following paper aims to investigate how McCloskey’s interest in the rhetoricof economics impacts her reading that the Modern World rose thanks to a rhetoricalchange, known as the Bourgeois Deal, and its virtues. The discussion will fundamentallybe around the ideas expressed in The Rhetoric of Economics (1983 and 1998a) and in theBourgeois Trilogy, besides other correlated works. We believe that her studies about theRhetoric in economics and its importance for the scientific method have a fundamentalinfluence on the research structure regarding the Trilogy. Even further, our argumentemphasizes that the Bourgeois Virtues alongside Rhetoric have not only a methodologicalsense, but also an ethical one, highlighting McCloskey’s appeal to a more humane, liberaland bourgeois economics.
Author: Lucas Klotz
Institution: University of Zurich
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4388195671