Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics

• Part I. Exordium: 1. A positivist youth; 2. Kicking the dead horse; Part II. Narration: 3. Economics in the human conversation; 4. The rhetoric of economics; Part III. Division: 5. The Science word in economics; 6. Three ways of reading economics to criticize itself; 7. Popper and Lakatos: thin ways of reading economics; 8. Thick readings: ethics, economics, sociology and rhetoric; Part IV. Proof: 9. The rise of a scientistic style; 10. The rhetoric of mathematical formalism: existence theorems; 11. General equilibrium and the rhetorical history of formalism; 12. Blackboard Marxism; 13. Formalists as poets and politicians; Part V. Refutation: 14. The very idea of epistemology; 15. The tu quoque argument and the claims of rationalism; 16. Armchair philosophy of economics: Rosenberg and Hausman; 17. Philosophy of science without epistemology: the Popperians; 18. The Rosenberg: reactionary modernism; 19. Methodologists of economics, big-M and small; 20. Getting 'rhetoric': Mark Blaug and the Eleatic Stranger; 21. Coats/McPherson/Friedman: anti-meta-post-modernism; 22. Splenetic rationalism, Austrian style; 23. The economists of ideology: Heilbroner, Rossetti, and Mirowski; 24. Rhetoric as morally radical; Part VI. Peroration: 25. The economy as a conversation; 26. The consequences of rhetoric.

"...witty, learned, inventive, disputatious, stylish, and aimed at the heart of economics as a discipline." Business History Review