Praise, blame, and oracle: The rhetorical tropes of political economy

Jerry Lamar Petersen

doi:10.7273/000006068

What I call the three master tropes of political economy (praise, blame, and oracle) are employed to demystify the writings of economists from the classical tradition epitomized by the moralist philosophy of the rhetorician Adam Smith, to the neoclassical schools proffering mathematical models to explain and predict, professing an infallible "science of economics." Ideological and materialistic, economic writings are especially concerned with private and public virtue, and thus they are inherently epideitic because they employ value-laden rhetoric to shape human behavior by strengthening attitudes and beliefs about how material outcomes are ideally achieved, including in the purportedly value-free domain of neoclassical and modern mainstream economics. My key terms are a heuristic to better comprehend the range of disagreement in political economy, which belies a movement from social and historical rhetorical concerns (inductive reasoning) to logic-bound abstract methods of investigation (deductive rationality). Praise and blame are the tropes used to hone in on qualities worthy of honor or dishonor (the good, true, and beautiful) in economic affairs, including goals, methods, and the basic building blocks of analysis (thus, the rhetoric) of various economic schools of thought. Oracle refers to a special brand of knowledge production in classical political economy that is demonstrated by the re-telling of creation myths and the rereading of history in search of the origins of human economics. Modern mainstream economics (an offshoot of neoclassical schools) employs the oracle to promise accurate prediction of the future by way of oblique signs found in complex mathematical models, but it ironically uses an inductive postulate of classical economics as a deductive (and uncontestable) first principle namely, the notion of individual self-interest as the prime motive of human behavior. I argue that the rhetoric of political economy is forever proving opposites, concerned with dramatic antithesis and reversals, a conflict that remains on the forefront of philosophy, rhetoric, and political economy, and which concerns the contrastive pairs of science versus social science, individualism verses collectivism, states versus markets, socialism versus capitalism, and finally, political economy versus a science of economics.

Praise, blame, and oracle: The rhetorical tropes of political economy

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