Abstract
The notion of alternative economies and organizations has been gradually gaining more traction in organization studies since the current financial crisis began in 2007-08. The US Academy of Management, for example, now hosts a rapidly growing group, Alternative Economic Futures, oriented towards mobilizing research and education to replace currently dominant socio-economic structures with alternatives more appropriate to human flourishing. Multi-disciplinary business and management schools such as Leicester in the UK exist to challenge the status quo through understanding and acting on different, sometimes radical, ways of organizing. Meanwhile, orthodox economists continue to promote the same ways of working and thinking as they have over the last fifty years, as evidenced in their textbooks – the crisis features mostly as an aside, contained in a box, or at best in a separate chapter that doesn’t affect the others (Madsen, 2013).
But of course just as organization studies is a broad church, so is economics. Deirdre McCloskey has sat on many different pews in her chosen house of scholarly worship – trained in the (in)famous Chicago School, specializing in economic history, then jumping the ideological wall to explore rhetoric for perhaps her most widely known work and argument (McCloskey, 1985). This book, and the two that precede it in the now-complete trilogy (McCloskey, 2006, 2010), work with the argument that economics is founded on metaphor, language and argument, despite its practitioners’ claims to represent reality through equations leading to mathematical proofs.
This book and the entire trilogy is academic narrative in a classical rhetorical sense – the ‘exordium’, an introductory oration, communicates this from the start, and every chapter, paragraph and sentence convey meaning through rhetoric as both practice and theoretical underpinning. There are probably no other academic writers quite like McCloskey in this sense. Rhetoric is the underpinning of the book’s structure, purpose and argument, it is central to the theorizing, and its practice here communicates the ideas that McCloskey claims have changed the world and how we live in the last two hundred years. The book’s substantive focus is ethics in economic activity, in the sense that ethics is a ‘continually renegotiated dance’ (p. xxiv) in which words, our rhetorics, carry meaning and communicate causal power.
The substantive argument is simultaneously transparent, easy to follow, and obscurely difficult to grasp. The bourgeoisie, McCloskey argues, the middle class of traders, inventors and managers, are described as ‘pretty good’. This ‘pretty good’ group first gained social value and financial influence in northwestern Europe, changed those societies, and then spread those changes around the world. The liberalism they developed allowed two forms of idea, that inventions should be made and exploited, and that a middle class is a good thing, into a global political project. The virtuous practice that a bourgeois ethic can encourage rests on a form of equality, in how we see and talk about each other. Because of this, according to McCloskey, we have experienced a Great Enrichment, a rise in goods and services available to the average citizen to purchase by a factor of between 30 and 100 (or possibly more – sometimes the figures are a little hazy). Capital, capitalism, or any other material changes, are not the reasons for this – ideas are the ‘initiating cause’ (p. xv). This is therefore a sociological change, not a psychological one, based on changing conversations about what constituted a good – (a modicum of) greed became a good thing, available to (nearly) all. This is the argument which McCloskey would like us to believe, rhetorically and factually.
The argument is made at such length here and in the previous two books of the trilogy because the ‘clerisy’, those living a bourgeois life who imagine that their successes are a result of their own actions only, have long been against this form of socio-economic liberalism, and for either socialism or nationalism. Pace McCloskey, this group has often tried to develop anti-liberal utopias to prove their point. The clerisy, which McCloskey despises with a special intensity, inhabits either side of the political divide without prejudice, promoting and practising either social Darwinism or economic Marxism (her terms). They are thus enemies of both McCloskey’s explanation and her purpose in making it. Her argument is also aimed at other groups, such as the ‘Samuelsonian’ economists who aim to reduce people and their lives to a curiously unreal form of rationality.
What, or who, is the argument for? Its creator tells us it is in the tradition of, first and foremost, the ‘Blessed Adam Smith’, then Veblen, Keynes, Gramsci, Galbraith, Hirschman, Sen and Ostrom, all economists who take the position that economic agents are in fact people who practise virtues. Evidence and theory are presented from a range of disciplines (e.g. social history, economics, politics, literature, art history, philosophy) in a variety of forms. The narrative also takes in most of what everyone else has said or written about post-Industrial Revolution political economy, sometimes dismissively. McCloskey is, of course, in favour of capitalism, as long as it is practised as ‘technological and institutional betterment at a frenetic pace, tested by unforced exchange among all the parties involved’, or ‘fantastically successful liberalism [i.e. institutionalized equality, liberty, dignity], in the old European sense, applied to trade and politics, as it was applied also to science and music and painting and literature’, as it will then lead to ‘trade-tested progress’ (p. xiii).
McCloskey’s social and economic libertarianism are more prominent, more clearly articulated, here than in previous books. She, and her arguments, do not lack empathy – she notes believably that ‘failures are deeply sad if you have the slightest empathy for human projects, or for humans’ (p. xxxiii). Nonetheless, all activity must be voluntarily tested by trade and competition – economic activity, art, sport, science and scholarship. The only alternative to market testing offered by McCloskey is ‘state compulsion backed by the monopoly of violence’ (p. xxxiii) – the promotion of subsidies, quotas, protections, a return to feudalism and the eternal maintenance of inherited privilege. The key argumentative shift in this rhetorical persuasion arrives relatively early, in Chapter 6 of 67. This is the point at which McCloskey addresses inequality. She attempts to distinguish between forms of forced equality (leftist, socialist, Communist, Marxist) and liberal elimination of absolute poverty (brought about by free trade in ideas, goods and beliefs). Most of the world’s population, according to McCloskey’s steady trickle of ownership facts and purchasing power accounting, lives well enough – not equally, but well enough to be content. (But are we?)
The key to all of this – positive social change, progressive political change, economic change for the material better – is, according to McCloskey, ideas and their relatively free circulation among populations that view each other as essentially equal. (But do we?) Populations should be non-aristocratic, anti-theocratic and resistant to plutocracy in designing the economy and polity. McCloskey’s writing is something to be experienced, a self-contained world of metaphor, rhetoric, statistics, judgements, cultural notes, literary theory, philosophy and, above all, argumentation. And this is the third volume in the trilogy, all more or less equally dense, rich and complex. All pursue the same argument, described above. So now that we have all two thousand or so pages of McCloskey’s rhetorical argumentative monument to explaining capitalism and economic life, does it work?
It does, on its own rhetorical terms. Setting those terms involves inclusion of some aspects of contemporary social and economic life, exclusion of others. In particular, McCloskey very smoothly categorizes the work of others according to her disciplinary, epistemological and political tastes. There are sidetracks that provide authoritative accounts of what art history has to tell us about the economy, and dismissals of socially significant ‘non-factual’ writing such as Naomi Klein’s latest book This Changes Everything. Both right and left are derided at times in this book, especially leftists (‘old leftists’, Communists, Marxists, those on the ‘hard left’, and socialists – all of them, without distinction). But make no mistake, McCloskey wants to win this argument with everyone – she wants to explain the Great Enrichment of the last two centuries definitively, partly because she thinks she’s right, and partly so that it can be extended to the one billion who live in extreme poverty today. Paradoxically, in this zero-sum argument, McCloskey’s touchstone is the idea and practice of a Middle – a just amount of profit, a reasonable amount of stuff, sustainable levels of exploitation, a degree of competition, and freedoms negotiated through virtuous practices.
This is presaged in the final acknowledgement near the start of the book, to McCloskey’s ‘Anglican Middle Way’ God, who is ‘a middle-aged, black, lesbian woman with a working-class accent of Doncaster’ (p. xlii). This is fitting, as the author takes the opportunity to signal a significant ethical presence in her working life. Professionally and rhetorically, it is also crucial: if McCloskey is trying to persuade any one presence above all of the virtues of her argument, her explanation of our contemporary economy, it is probably her bourgeois and nonconformist god. The rhetoric here is designed to make an argument that retains an eternal relevance to the disciplines it takes to task.