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The Emperor's Newest Clothes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2008

Martin Hollis
Martin Hollis
Affiliation:
University of East Anglia
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Extract

There is a simple joy in finding that the emperor has positively no clothes and especially when the finger is pointed in ribald good English. Donald McCloskey does this service in “The Rhetoric of Economics”, where he argues with force and wit that “modernism” (meaning, roughly, positivism, as in “Positive Economics”) will do as an account neither of what economists do nor of what it makes philosophical sense for them to attempt. Instead they should recognize that models are always metaphors and should make a virtue of the literary devices, which they in fact rely on. Armed with the craft of rhetoric and a new “poetics of economics,” they will achieve better writing, better teaching, better foreign relations, better science and better dispositions.

Type
Discussions
Information
Economics & Philosophy , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , April 1985 , pp. 128 - 133
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1985

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References

1. Journal of Economic Literature, vol.21 (06 1983), pp. 481–517.Google Scholar

2. Collingwood, R. G. argued this case in An Essay on Metaphysics, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1940Google Scholar. His account of Absolute Presuppositions there fully anticipates the recent notion of paradigms.