The Rhetoric of Praise, Blame, and Oracle in the Moral Persuasion of Political Economy

Jerry Petersen

Journal of Economic Issues, 2025, vol. 59, issue 3, 780-797

Abstract: Despite the reputation of mainstream economics as motivated by disinterested science, I argue that speech about wealth and poverty is and has always been primarily rhetorical and epideictic, employing value-laden tropes of praise, blame, and prophecy. I claim the scope of modern mainstream economics, absorbed in theoretical models and the actions of individuals, should return to its roots in political economy, a social science of cross-disciplinary rhetoric concerned with our collective well-being as citizens. By highlighting the problem of inequality and stories from the 2008 fiscal crisis and Plato’s Protagoras, I dramatize that speech about economics is, like rhetoric itself, forever proving of opposites, showing economic systems to be more the products of moral persuasion than so-called intractable economic realities.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1080/00213624.2025.2533727

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