Abstract
This book review focuses mainly on McCloskey’s use and advocacy of rhetoric as it applies to liberalism. We summarize McCloskey’s understanding of the importance of rhetoric to a proper grasp of the nature and value of liberalism. In the process we also raise questions about the foundations of rhetoric as a tool for substantive persuasion.
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Notes
See also Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics in McKeon’s edition of The Basic works of Aristotle (1968).
See Deirdre N. McCloskey’s trilogy published by the University of Chicago Press: The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for An Age of Commerce (McCloskey, 2006); Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Economic World (McCloskey, 2010); and Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World (McCloskey, 2016).
Certainly, it could be claimed that one might be using rhetoric to persuade others of the virtues of liberalism for self-interested reasons or motives, such as that one believes liberal orders will improve their financial condition. However, it is more likely that one seeks to persuade others of the value of liberalism because one believes it is true, right, or best. To assume one can only act on the basis of the former motivation illustrates the problem of the narrowness and applicability of homo economicus.
Though Karl Popper strictly speaking is not a logical positivist, McCloskey treats his rejection of the role of sense experience in theory formation and insistence on his falsifiability principle as the test for whether a claim is scientific as providing a much too thin account of scientific conversation. See McCloskey (1994, p. 85).
McCloskey has also noted (2001, p. 102) that “postmodernism can be given an economic and classical liberal …reading.”
See Douglas B. Rasmussen and Douglas J. Den Uyl, The Realist Turn: Repositioning Liberalism (2020). See also David Gordon (2021), who takes issue with McCloskey’s claim that conceptual relativity is no longer controversial
McCloskey would, of course, not claim this, and indeed her work invites such a question.
Yet, see McCloskey (2001) for an attempt to trace the history of this notion.
Kant would argue that all human beings construct reality in basically the same way and hence there can be no problem with competing constructions. Of course, there certainly seem to be competing constructions, and if it is in principle impossible to know the nature of things as they are, then to what can one appeal?
There are those in the pragmaticist tradition, that is, those inspired more by Charles Sanders Peirce than William James or John Dewey, who reject a constructivist account of facts. For example, see Susan Haack, Evidence and Inquiry: Towards Reconstruction in Epistemology (Oxford: Basic Blackwell, 1993), and Frederick L. Will, Pragmatism and Realism (1997).
See Rasmussen (1994), particularly, pp. 423–424.
See Norms of Liberty: A Perfectionist Basis for Non-Perfectionist Politics (Rasmussen & Den Uyl, 2005), The Perfectionist Turn: From Metanorms to Metaethics (Den Uyl & Rasmussen, 2016), and The Realist Turn: Repositioning Liberalism (Rasmussen & Den Uyl, 2020). See also Den Uyl (2009) and Rasmussen (2020).
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Roger E. Bissell, David Gordon, and Rosolino Candela, Book Review Editor, as well as the other editors of this journal for their assistance.
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Rasmussen, D.B., Den Uyl, D.J. Liberalism, rhetoric, and how to be post-modern: a review essay of Deirdre Nansen McCloskey’s why liberalism works: how true Liberal values produce a freer, more equal, prosperous world for all. Rev Austrian Econ 37, 95–103 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11138-021-00564-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11138-021-00564-7