Ideas, Virtues and the Bourgeois Deal: McCloskey’s Rhetoric of Economics Reasserted

Abstract

Deirdre N. McCloskey’s contributions to Economics cover a wide range of topics, including
studies in Economic History, Methodology, Language and Ethics. Her most recent
collection of studies, the Bourgeois Trilogy (2006, 2010a and 2016a), substantiates this
interdisciplinarity by bringing these fields together to reassess the history of the Modern
World. The following paper aims to investigate how McCloskey’s interest in the rhetoric
of economics impacts her reading that the Modern World rose thanks to a rhetorical
change, known as the Bourgeois Deal, and its virtues. The discussion will fundamentally
be around the ideas expressed in The Rhetoric of Economics (1983 and 1998a) and in the
Bourgeois Trilogy, besides other correlated works. We believe that her studies about the
Rhetoric in economics and its importance for the scientific method have a fundamental
influence on the research structure regarding the Trilogy. Even further, our argument
emphasizes that the Bourgeois Virtues alongside Rhetoric have not only a methodological
sense, but also an ethical one, highlighting McCloskey’s appeal to a more humane, liberal
and bourgeois economics.