Giorgio Baruchello

The Moral Economists: R. H. Tawney, Karl Polanyi, E. P. Thompson, and the Critique of Capitalism

In the history of Great Britain, the period from the 1880s to the 1970s was marked by unprecedented overall economic growth, especially in the thirty years following the end of the Second World War...

The Money Mystique

The title of William Goetzmann’s book states: “Money changes everything.” This much rings true, and it probably is. Goetzmann’s volume offers compelling evidence in support of the thesis stated in ...

Inventing Falsehood, Making Truth: Vico and Neapolitan Painting

historical erudition, both intellectual and economic, would be a boon to the discipline and to its contribution to human welfare. For one, no future textbook of economics should contain blunders comparable to Parkin, Powell and Matthews’s (2007) account of fourteenth-century English enclosures of the commons, which they claim to have suffered from “over-grazing” (366). It should also appeal topolitical and social scientists, since the activities of individual economists and pivotal features of economic life (e.g., wage setting, tax laws) are shown to depend on socio-historical contingencies, conventions, and power relations (e.g., trade unions). Philosophers too might find this book of some relevance, as interesting moral, logico-argumentative and rhetorical aspects of economic thought surface rather often in Schlefer’s account (e.g., tautologies, circular reasoning, question-begging, dismissal of contrary evidence as “anecdotal,” ad hoc and unfalsifiable hypotheses, the persuasive force of technical jargon and mathematical expressions). In truth, most if not all of the interesting aspects of the book “surface” in this way, for it suffers from one serious rhetorical flaw. Whilst the arguments made (inventio) and the style chosen (elocutio) by Schlefer are very effective, the organisation of the material (dispositio) is not. Even the assumptions that the book’s title announces to be revealing and targeting are presented, if not scattered, in a sparse and unfocused manner, rather than listed and addressed in a more structured form. Indeed, the author gets close to doing something of this sort only in the middle of the twelfth chapter, but falls short of it for fear of “sound[ing] like a broken record” (212). The book could also be criticised for the unexpected absence of important critical voices within and about orthodox economics (e.g., Michel Aglietta, Cornelius Castoriadis, John Kenneth Galbraith, Michael Hudson, Deirdre McCloskey, John McMurtry) or any reference to an alternative economic perspective that is not based on Keynes. For instance, despite the historical wealth of the book, Chesterton’s and Belloc’s distributism is nowhere to be found in the book. However, such a line of criticism is secondary. Book authors have to choose what to leave out as well as what to keep in, in the hope of producing good arguments in support of their claims. Since Schlefer’s claims are well presented and well supported, a broader spectrum of references would have been beneficial, but is not, after all, necessary.

'Who Are We?' On Rorty, Rhetoric, and Politics

Abstract It is not unusual to think of Rorty’s work as a success in rhetoric and a failure in political philosophy. In this article we re-evaluate this assessment by analyzing a typical feature of Rorty’s writing: his frequent use of “we so-and-so.” Taking stock of the existing literature on the subject we discuss how Rorty’s use of the “we” was received by peers and how he himself made sense of it. We then analyze Rorty’s oeuvre in order to show that a better understanding of his rhetorical “we” could make his politico-philosophical “we” more appealing. We suggest that Rorty’s pragmatist take on “ethnos” is preferable to other notions that are currently championed in political theory and philosophy.