McCloskey's Rhetoric: Discourse Ethics in Economics. By Benjamin Balak. New York and London: Routledge, 2006. 142 pp. $115.00, ISBN 0-415-31682-0.
Twenty-three years after its Journal of Economic Literature debut, Deirdre McCloskey's vision of "economics in the human conversation" remains a tour de force. Her colorful critique of the modernist dream of economics-as-Science offers an incisive and inspiring rationale for the renewal of economics as a liberal arts discipline. Yet, because McCloskey's philosophical writings tend to be pigeonholed within specialist literatures (methodology, rhetoric, postmodernism), they are not widely read by professional economists. So even as McCloskey's name ...