6 the Rhetoric of Modern Economics

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DOI: 10.1177/095269519000300206

1990 3: 243History of the Human SciencesPhilip Mirowski

The rhetoric of modern economics

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The rhetoric of modern

economics

PHILIP MIROWSKI

HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES Vol. 3 No. 2

Gogols so-called wife was an ordinary dummy made of thick rubber,naked for all seasons, buff in tint ... One is faced with the necessity of

asking oneself who she really was, or whether it would be proper to speakof a single person - and in fact we shall see that it would be imprudent to

press this point. The cause of these changes, as my readers will already haveunderstood, was nothing else but the will of Nikolai Vassilevich himself.He would inflate her to a greater or lesser degree, would change her wigand her other tufts of hair, would grease her with ointments and touch her

up in various ways ...And how can I have stated above that it was Nikolai

Vassilevichs will which ruled thatwoman? In a certain sense, yes, it is true;but it is equally certain that she became no longer his slave but his tyrant.(Tommaso Landolfi, Gogols Wife)

Surely here is an opportunity to get rid of that great stick of a characterHomo economicus and to replace him with somebody real, like MadameBovary. (Donald McCloskey, The Rhetoric of Economics)

I cannot speak for other areas of the human sciences, but I think that so far themovement to infuse economics with the expansive fresh air of rhetoric has beena flop. I say this not in the sense that the movement has been ignored: on the

contrary, prompted by the work ofMcCloskey (1985) it has been entertained bythe most extraordinary range of economists - from Marxists to advocates ofrational expectations - in their quotidian discourse and even, although to a lesser

extent, in their writings. Nevertheless, the effect of this discourse aboutdiscourse upon the practices of the economics profession has been nil; so

insignificant has the diversion been that one suspects Homo economicus has notbeen discarded so much as lopsidedly inflated in a few places to provide a novelset of amusements.

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Of course, to say that a rhetorical approach to economics has been ineffectualis to presume that some rejuvenation was intended or desired in the first place. Inthe case of the progenitor of the movement, Donald McCloskey, it would seemthat the conscious goals were fairly modest: there was a crusade to get economiststo write better (as if such a deficiency were not indicative of deeper flaws in theeducation and horizons of the economics profession), and then there was theoblique intention to defend the status quo in orthodox economics from itsnumerous detractors. Economics has always had its share of charlatans and

quick-buck artists, but fin-de-siecle orthodox economics (generally referred to asneo-classical economics) had a more debilitatingly endemic problem, namely,being amongst all the human sciences the most strident advocate of a narrowscientism in a

periodwhen cultural trends were

tendingin the

oppositedirection

(Mirowski, 1987). That is not to mention some internal problems whichexacerbated disquiet with the ideal of a social physics, such as the great wave ofrevulsion which passed over the discipline in the 1980s with respect toeconometric models, itself a product of the embarrassment of the economic

planners by the simultaneous inflation and unemployment of the mid-70s.Andthen, of course, there is the palpable relative decline of theAmerican economy, a

reproach to scientistic expertise if there ever was one. But a little history shouldgive us pause: after all, the initial rise of neo-classical economics in the 1870s

through the 1890s coincided with the industrial decline of Britain (a declineMcCloskey has elsewhere claimed did not exist).Many advocates of a rhetoric of the human sciences such as Rorty (1987),

(1989), Nelson, Megill and McCloskey (1988), Klamer etal. (1988), Benjamin,Cantor and Christie (1987), Milberg (1988), seem to regard it as the veryantithesis of scientism, something like the vindication of such low-rent humanistareas as literary criticism and semiotics in the face of overinvestment in the hardsciences; but nothing would be further from the truth in economics. There,rhetoric and scientism have been yoked together in an alliance all the more

formidable because of its incongruity. By reinterpreting rhetoric as beinglargely concerned with narrow issues of communication problems in econ-omics (Klamer et al., 1988: 277), some strange synecdoche has allowed it to be

regarded as simiiar to a market process. Since there is nothmg more characteristicof the doctrines of neo-classical economics than a belief in the optimality ofmarkets, it was but a hop, skip and jump to the conclusion that It is a marketargument. There is no need for philosophical lawmaking or methodologicalregulation to keep the economy of the intellect running just fine (McCloskey,1985: 29).

I do not know if the connection between rhetoric and quietism is to be foundin other disciplines as well; although it would certainly fit the mood of the lastdecade and explain its recent popularity. If a mugwump is a conservative whowishes to maintain the faqade of critical independence without becoming anaffront, then rhetoric is the mugwump party of the social sciences in the 1980s.



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rules, especially in the context of public discourse, and proposed to taxonomizeall the various methods which seemed to be at the disposal of the well-temperedorator. Of course, those taxonomies and techniques could be equally put toservice for good or for ill; picking and choosing among the possibilities alsorequired a delicacy and sensitivity to the moods of the audience, since minorvariations in ambience could render a particular trope ineffective. It was the veryindeterminacy of the stopping rules which so irritated the Cartesians, for

example. They wanted to redefine rationality so as to isolate it from all emotionalattachments.As Descartes wrote to Mersenne in 1629, Order is what is needed:

All the thoughts that can come into the human mind must be arranged in an orderlike the natural order of numbers.

Neo-classical economists are the modern descendants of the Cartesians.

Theydislike the rhetorical multiform conception of rationality, longing for the

determinacy and impersonality of the mechanical rule. Indeed, they have takenDescartes as their mentor in more ways than one, following his lead in the Trait[de 1Homme (Descartes, 1972) in reducing psychology to matter in motion. Inother words, the progenitors of neo-classical economics attempted to break thereductio by asserting that mind was nothing more than a force field of energy,obeying the same laws as the inanimate world. I mean this quite literally (if thatwere not such an oxymoron): they copied the mechanics of energy regnant in the

mid-nineteenth century down to the last partial derivative, relabelled thevariables (forces- prices, space~ commodity space, potential energy- utility,and so forth), and dubbed the result rationality. In a wicked bit of reverse

English, the constrained optimization problems which in physics had been takenas signs of the rationality and intelligibility of the physical world were turnedright round to define rationality in the economic world. The early neo-classicalswere quite open and aboveboard about all this; it has only been subsequentgenerations of economists whose dislike of rhetoric has been surpassed only bydisdain for the history of their own discipline to whom this narrative seems

shocking or novel.2

The rhetorical force of what was, after all, little more than the appropriation ofa metaphor, was a most profound evasion of the problem of vicious circles insoclai theory. By equating potential energy with a rather vague notion ofpotential desires, and asserting that all human action is explained by themathematical problem of the optimization over those desires, most of theconundrums of social theory and the meaning of rationality were dispelled with awave of the wand of science.Attention was cagily shifted from the content of thedesires to the supposed means of achieving them: the Panjandrum would be

pronounced rational if only she optimized. Since optimization was the rule inboth the human and inanimate spheres, rationality was truly general, indepen-dent of opinion in both temporal and spatial location. The theorist claimed toavoid the reductio by asserting he was no different from anyone else: indeed,since the market already achieved the optimum, he was doing his best to follow



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his own dictates, rendering manifest the natural logic of the situation. Conflict,disputation, forms of learning, forms of discourse, path-dependent processes andall other institutional excrescences of social organization could be ignored; in

fact, one could regard them as irrational by definition (Pareto,1935). What fool,after all, would wish to be put in the unenviable position of having to explain theirrational (Arrow in Hogarth and Reder, 1986: 202)? But above all, thiscrypto-physical rationality guaranteed that the agent was perfectly transparent tohimself and to others: all shadows of false consciousness were banished.3Byimplication, the economist was vindicated from all accusations of falseconsciousness: just like everyone else, he conformed only to the rules he himselfhad spoken.How could such a patently banal account of human rationality come to

dominate such a large subset of the discussion of social life? By a rhetorical tactic,one that linked this construction of the rational to science itself, conflating thetwo.As an editorial in the magazine Nature put it in 1870, Science, used in itswider sense [is] simply the employment of means adequate to the attainment of adesired end. Whether that end be the constitution of a government, the

organization of an army or a navy, the spread of learning, or the repression ofcrime, if the means adopted have attained the object, then science has been atwork. Science delivered the goods; the Rational was the Scientific; energymodels described the mind; energy/utility delivered the goods to market.As

long as the fascination with the vender and the dynamo kept people from lookingat the interwoven tropes too carefully, this curious construction of the rationalremained intact.

But of course, if one, out of perversity or simple curiosity, did choose to lookmore closely, then the thing blew over like a house of cards. For instance, onceone started to append qualifications, one inadvertently reintroduced thereductio: we apply the term logical action to actions that logically cojoin meansto ends not only from the standpoint of the subject performing them, but also

from the standpoint of other persons who have a more extensive knowledge(Pareto, 1935: 77; emphases added). Who else was this transcendental readerover the shoulder to be but Pareto himself? Or suppose the artificial ribbing and

stitching of Homo economicus were a tad too obtrusive for modern tastes, and soone attempted to allow for a little conflict and a little bit of interpretativedissonance in the mathematics (von Neumann and Morgenstern, 1964)? Thenwhat eventually happened is that the proliferation of incommensurate alternativesolution concepts in game theory left you back with no optimum optimorum(Mirowski, 1988: chapter 5) but only an infinitely expansible taxonomy of rest

points:it was

justas bad as classical rhetoric! Or

supposeyou were very

specificin placing restrictions upon the nature of the tastes purportedly harboured bythose rational creatures the economic blow-up dolls. Real people in both real andcontrolled experimental situations then failed the test miserably (Tversky andKahneman in Hogarth and Reder, 1986). If one reacted to these disconfirmations



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by retreating to the excuse that the economic theory was not descriptive butrather proscriptive - that is, people should shape up and behave like the physicsmannikins - then the fundamental toponym of the rhetoric became apparent. In

economics, rationality is the shorthand for the wilful reduction of society tonature.

II THE RHETORIC OFAUTHORITY

Well before the present popularity of rhetoric in the human sciences, socialtheorists such as Gouldner (1974) or Bloor (1972) recognized that there was

something more to social explanation than science: that something more was

metaphor. The problem of categorization, the attribution of identities anddifferences, transcends any logical exercise. It is simultaneously structure andfunction, an artefact in the genesis, conceptualization, and enforcement of socialorder. It is naive to treat the quality of sameness, which characterizes membersof a class, as if they were a quality inherent in things or a power of recognitioninherent in the mind (Douglas, 1986: 58). The treatment of identity astransparent is the stance of mechanical rationality outlined above, which retreatsto the natural to avoid the problem of authority that lurks at the centre of everysocial act. Who legitimizes? Who vouches? Who says so? Literary critics

have understood this for quite some while: The metaphors we care for most arealways embedded in metaphorical structures that finally both depend on andconstitute selves and societies. To understand a metaphor is by its very nature todecide whether to join the forces of a metaphorist or to resist him (Booth inSachs, 1979: 61-3).Even to present the assimilation of metaphor as a problem of choice is to make

too many concessions to methodological individualism, according to some

anthropologists. The relevant literature in this regard begins in 1903 with theproposal by Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss that, in what they identified as

primitive culture, the classification of things reproduces the classifications ofmen (Durkheim and Mauss, 1963). Both the original formulation and theethnographic evidence presented to support this thesis were widely challenged,and probably correctly so, but that has not prevented the core of the idea beingtaken up and revised by the Edinburgh strong programme in the history ofscience in order to apply it to western science (Bloor, 1982; Barnes and Shapin,1979). The thesis has been further augmented by the anthropologist MaryDouglas by also asserting its antithesis: namely, the social classification of men isoften a mirror image of a cultures classifications of the natural world. In her own

words:

the logical patterning in which social relations are offered affords a bias inthe classification of nature, and that in this bias is to be found the confident

intuition of self-evident truth.And here, in this intuition, is the most



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some very brief illustrations of the vortex in western intellectual history. Onemight choose, for instance, the development of the concept of biologicalevolution in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.As is now fairly well

documented in Young, 1985 and Schweber, 1980, a very important discussionwhich crystallized the notion of natural selection for Charles Darwin was theargument within classical political economy concerning the role of competitionand population growth in the equilibration of the subsistence wage; it was bothDarwins and Wallaces reading of Malthuss Essay on Population whichprecipitated the image of a natural struggle resulting in unintended order inspeciation. Control also played a crucial role in Darwins comparison of artificialselection by breeders to selection by the hand of Nature. These anthropo-morphic images transmuted what was potentially an anomic and alien processinto a eidolon of human interaction, one which (while perhaps threatening toreligion) sported the air of a soothing commonplace. But of course, once such aneffective metaphor finds a foothold in the natural world, it will be rapidly turnedaround to justify existing social relations; and this happened almost immediatelyin the format of social Darwinism (Bannister, 1979). Perhaps it is not sofar-fetched to see natural selection as a justification for capitalism red in tooth andclaw, once one recognizes that the particular construction of competition camefrom political economy in the first place. But since the vortex has no beginningand no end, the dynamic did not stop there. Further elaboration of the ideas andimages of social Darwinism, liberally salted with further developments withinpolitical economy, were then re-projected back upon the sphere of nature, thistime in population ecology (Kingsland, 1985), and, of course, later in the guise of

sociobiology.And the wheel will not stop there, either.

Perhaps, for those who feel that the only real science is physics, anotherexample is called for. Here an interesting illustration of the DMD thesis isprovided by the vicissitudes of the idea of randomness and stochastic formalismsin the history of the west. We could begin with early codifications of wisdom

concerning gamblingand

equally early legalnotions of fair division of

riskypartnership profits (Daston, 1988); these became encapsulated in early defi-nitions of mathematical expectations. Next, upon confronting the problem oforder when it came to discrepancies in astronomical1- vaLivns, me formalismof mathematical expectation became reconceptualized as a law of error, a natural

pattern of distribution of error about the true value. The Gaussian or Normal

distribution was then re-projected back on to the social sphere with the work ofAdolphe Quetelet and his homme moyen (Porter, 1985). Predicated upon theimage of Normal error, all sorts of statistical regularities from the ratio of

male/female births to the proportion of annual suicides in Paris were asserted tobe evidence of Natural law in the social sphere, conflating the earlier language ofrigidly deterministic law with the newer mathematics of stochastic regularity.Then, under the influence of Herschel and Quetelet, James Clerk Maxwell oncemore transposed the metaphor of randomness into the sphere of Nature by



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asserting that our lack of knowledge of the initial conditions of the millions ofmolecules in an ideal gas justified the use of the Normal distribution in thederivation of the classical gas laws (Porter, 1981). Once stochastic formalisms

were introduced into physics, they spread quite inexorably, from statisticalmechanics to quantum mechanics and beyond. Some even suggested that thewillingness to entertain a notion of fundamental and irreducible randomness atthe micro level was linked to the perceived breakdown of social order in Weimar

Germany (Forman, 1971). But the dynamic did not stop there: attempts toreinterpret stochastic formalisms in physics so that intuitions of Natural Ordercould be reconciled with convictions of social order continued apace; and then

such innovations were projected back on to the social sphere, particularly ineconomics in the 1930s, in the format of the econometrics movement

(Mirowski, 1989b).And it will not end there, either.Other examples could be developed as easily; a truly determined rhetoric

movement in social theory would have as one of its goals the progressive de-velopment of such narratives. But in the present case, the most relevant exampleis that already cited: the appropriation of the physical metaphor of the force fieldto do double duty as the basis of a mathematical economics of value. That appro-priation was not unusual or exceptional in the light of the DMD thesis and,indeed, was only one instalment of an extended vortex of metaphorical appropri-ation and transformation. The story is told in detail in Mirowski (1989a: chapters2-5); it may be sufficient here to say that the concept of energy may itself be seenas slowly transformed metaphor passed back and forth between economics and

physics, one moment the eidetic epitome of a stingy Nature denying us some-thing for nothing, and the next the Natural justification for market organization.The importance of the DMD thesis in the present context is that it provides a

rhetorical explanation for the strength of authority of neo-classical economicsbeyond such commonplaces as its transparent persuasive character or thewisdom, virtue, and perspicacity of its progenitors. In contrast we can observethat it

partakes directlyin the institutionalized discourse which

groundsthe

Social in the Natural and vice versa. It is not merely the authority of the normalscientists who happen to control a discipline at any point in time, nor the

authority of a well-crafted and intricately logical argument. It is the best kind ofauthority possible: a narrative so rooted in the very construction of the meaningof order characteristic of our culture that it cannot be attributed to any one

person or group. To violate this authority is to violate order in the abstract: toremove oneself from the language community by definition.

III THE RHETORIC OF MATHEMATICAL CLOSURE

The role of mathematics in the rhetoric of economics is felt by many economiststo be important, but nevertheless is rarely the subject of sustained critical



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meditation. One reason appears to be that, in the present day and age, for anyoneto question the rhetoric of mathematics in economics is taken to be tacit evidenceof deficient mathematical prowess. Since self-immolation is frequently felt to be a

futile gesture, an uneasy silence reigns in this area.But there are some rather simple things which can be said regarding the present

state of affairs. First, the penetration of mathematical discourse into economicswas essentially identical with the spread of the neo-classical paradigm (Mirowski,1990). Given that the gist of the theory was the appropriation of a mathematical

metaphor, this may not be surprising. Yet the association of a particular theorywith an explicitly mathematical discourse did have some specific effects upon theevolution of the discipline. Not only did mathematics influence the stories to betold, such as that concerning rationality; it also shaped the social structures of the

resulting language-community. The people who were best equipped to discussthe new Homo economicus were those with previous training in the physicalsciences (and this is still the case). Should one expect this kind of bias toreverberate back upon the structure of an intellectual discipline?Alfred Marshall,the initiator of serious economic studies at Cambridge University, wrote:

The new analysis is endeavouring gradually and tentatively to bring overinto economics, as far as the widely different nature of the material willallow, those methods of the science of small increments (commonly called

the differential calculus) to which man owes directly or indirectly thegreater part of the control that he has obtained in recent times over physicalnature. It is still in its infancy; it has no dogmas, no standard of orthodoxy... there is a remarkable harmony and agreement on essentials amongthose who are working constructively by the new method; and especiallyamong such of them as have served an apprenticeship in the simpler andmore definite, and therefore more advanced, problems of physics.(Marshall, 1920: xvi-xvii)

Suchstatements were

ingenuous in theextreme.

As Maloney (1985: 46) put it, &dquo;literary&dquo; and &dquo;scientific&dquo; would seem to be Marshalls way of separating thecognoscenti from the outsiders as regards subjective value theory. Of coursethere was a dogma and a standard of orthodoxy: it was an eths Imbibedduringthe apprenticeship in physics or engineering. This ethos allowed the tyroneo-classicals to recognize each other as prosecuting the same research

programme, solved many prior problems of constituting a coherent languagecommunity from scratch, and imbued the initiates with shared ideals and imageswhich could only have been the result of conscious indoctrination. Oddly

enough, as in the case of rationality, we again see the aspiring social theoristsdenying the existence of any social component to their activities. To a greatextent, it was the mathematics which made this disappearing act possible.

Mathematics is a primary tool in the creation of a well-behaved audience for a

particular type of discourse, one which acts fairly stringently to banish



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dissension. It is a prosaic but none the less acute observation that the time spent inmastering the mathematics and the subsequent translation of those symbols intofixed eternal referents is an exacting regimen sufficient to discourage the sceptical

and reinforce the self-esteem of the successful recruit. (How many mathematicalphysicists are fundamentally sceptical concerning the cogency of their disci-pline ?) Mathematics is that very special sphere of human discourse where theassertion of the discreteness of intellectual constructs is pushed to an extreme notoften found in other spheres. Only there can be found the most rigidly inflexibleclaims that the manipulation of symbols is either unambiguously correct orunambiguously incorrect. (We leave aside the fact that some acquaintance withadvanced metamathematics throws these claims into doubt; we now are referringto the pedagogy of mathematics encountered by almost everyone in the earlystages in their career.) This construction of knowledge is particularly serviceablein the classroom, where social discipline and the hierarchical status of teacher andstudent are projected into the realm of knowledge itself, holding forth thepromise of a knowledge capable of sanctioning the correct application of its ownfixed rules. Once this rhetoric is internalized, it then seems to the tyro thatmathematics can police itself.

While this Platonic image of self-policing knowledge independent of thelanguage community does not do much harm in physics, it most certainly weighsheavily upon social theory. There the metaphor of self-policing knowledge isprojected on to the social sphere in general: in economics, it is an important propof the dogma of the self-policing and self-sufficient market. In neo-classicaltheory, many of the constraints binding the actors partake of the character ofnatural limitations because the attitudes imbibed in mathematical apprentice-ship are inimical to processes of interpretation and reinterpretation, the antithesisof the unforeseen redefinition of a problem which is the prerogative of a

rationality not allowed in neo-classical theory.4An instance from economic history may make this a little clearer (St Clair,

1986).In orthodox neo-classical

economics,if a firm is faced with a

shrinkingmarket, either it simply acquiesces in the situation by cutting output, or exitingthe industry, or perhaps investing further in technical change to increase itsmarket share. But no really dynamic capitalist firm ever conforms so passively tosuch a poverty-strickennotion of rationality. For instance, when the auto marketwas stagnant in the USA in the 1930s, the major producers formed consortia to

buy up existing urban public transportation and convert it to buses, and lobbiedCongress to build highways through urban areas to open up a larger market.They did not take the market situation as given, but were willing to transform

vast swatches of society to make it conform to their conception of an expandingmarket. It is the appreciation of, or even the ability to detect, this kind of

rationality which is discouraged by mathematical training in neo-classicaleconomics.

Further, Colvin (1977) suggests that the discrete character of mathematical



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training encourages what she calls a norm of closure. This rhetorical normelevates certain preferred approaches to explanation in discourse, such as therestriction of a phenomenon in time and space, an ideal of constant conjunction

of events, a tendency to atomism and a hostility to novelty arising from merecombination. The extent to which this norm is characteristic of a particular vin-tage of physics rather than of all mathematics per se is not an issue here, sinceneo-classical economics is an imitation of the vintage of physics described.Colvin goes on to suggest that this norm of closure comes to encompass the

social structure of the intellectual discipline that embraces it. For example, re-search in such a discipline grows more fragmented and discrete over time, andtopics of enquiry begin to exhibit the atomism and dissociation projected in thesocial theory. The conviction gains currency that rigour is identical with themost extreme ontological individuation; losing sight of the big picture be-comes something akin to a virtue.A certain anomie sets in, with mathematicalworkers appealing ultimately to epistemologically vague elegance or sim-plicity as the prime arbiters of good work. Jokes are common about thenumber of people in the world who can understand what the researcher is

doing. Legitimation becomes slowly confused with the norm of closure itself,so there arises a low threshold of toleration for debate which does not seem to

be immediately headed towards closure. Indeed, the optimum optimorum is tohave no debate at all, by dissolving the human personality of the researcher intoan inexorable and impersonal project of knowledge coming to know Itself(Brush, 1974).Now, we should not go so far as to claim that mathematicians are somehow

responsible for most of the silly social science perpetrated over the last twocenturies; there is more than enough culpability right at home to share about.Nevertheless, it is extremely important to observe that the penetration ofmathematics into a conversation about social life transforms disciplines bytransforming discourse. While explicit anonymity is increasingly frowned upon

(Kronick, 1988),mathematical discourse substitutes its own effective

anonym-ity. The restriction of communication to a few suitably prepared initiates intothe language, the resulting isolation and appeals to the indefinite future forlegitimation, the apparent neutrality of the highly stylized format oftheorem-proof-comment, all serve to disguise and obliterate the humanpersonality behind it all. Intersubjectivity is excluded largely by rhetoricaltropes:

The existence of theAbstract posits that it is possible to summarize its

essential content, i.e., that the latter is independent from the expositionsliterary form and argumentative context. The distinction betweenIntroduction and Discussion, on the one hand, and Methods and Results,on the other, implies the possibility to divorce interpretation fromdescription, while the division between Methods and Results indicates a



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similar possibility of separating the ways of investigation from itsfindings. (Markus, 1987: 12)

This extremeindividuation,

this

ontological fragmentation,is a

function of themathematical drive for closure. Instead of the Word made Flesh, it is the Flesh ofScience made Rhetoric.

IV ENVOII

And lastly, I should like to bring it to your attention, my dear sir, from amore, ahem, elevated point of view, that a work of art can be free not onlyfrom linguistic conventions but from all conventions and that it creates itsown rules. Certainly not, I cried, seeing the better part of my argumentslipping away. You cant get out of it that easily. Now youre in danger ofrelying on a sophism yourself. You are taking it for granted that what isinvolved is a work of art. But that is precisely what has to be examined:where and what are the criteria you use for your evaluation? (TommasoLandolfi, Dialogue on the greater harmonies, Gogols Wife)

Tufts University

NOTES

This article was written with the help of a grant from the National Endowment for theHumanities, which is not responsible for its content.

1An honourable exception to this generalization is What are nice folks like you doing ina place like this? by Michael McGee and John Lyne, in Nelson etal.,1988.Another is

the work ofArjo Klamer, often mistakenly conflated with that of McCloskey.2 I have documented the history of neo-classical economics in copious detail in Mirowski

(1989a) for those interested. I should also say that this solution to the problem ofrational self-reference is only one of many possible escape routes to be found amongstwestern economists; it is merely the one most consistent with the appropriation of thephysics formalism. It should not be confused, for instance, with the solution of Hayek(1967: 60-2), who posits an inaccessible and innate meta-consciousness which servesas the final arbiter of rationality, and also thus justifies the rationality of the marketwithout being able to describe what the market does.

3 If some historically liberal economists (say, Keynesians, for instance) let a little bit ofself-delusion back into the theory, they had to be rapidly exorcized by such revanchistmovements as the rational expectations theorists.

4 I am not claiming that there is something inherent in the mathematics itself which

prohibits such freedom of redefinition; indeed, Lakatos (1976) is a perfect example ofthis process. Rather, it is the pedagogy of mathematics, getting the right answer, which



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produces people unlikely to attack a problem in this manner, or see a societal ordergrowing out of such processes.

5 It would be a bit too facile, however, to link the recent decline of theAmerican

economy to the penetration of neo-classical training into business schools in thepost-1970 period.

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