« Si vous êtes si malins… » McCloskey et la rhétorique des économistes

In 1983, the august Journal of Economic Literature published an article which could only be described as iconoclastic. Written by an author who, up to that time, had been known for her classic works in the field of quantitative economic history, the paper discusses the rhetoric used by economists. D. N. McCloskey states, among other things, that the study of economic texts stems primarily from literary criticism; that mathematical models, highly valued by economists, are essentially metaphorical and constitute a genuinely original poetic genre; that professional economists, at the very least, joined the epistemological revolution late in comparison with their contemporaries when they claimed to guarantee their scientific authority over their real ability to make predictions.
A strong current of thought on the rhetoric of economics sprang from this act of defiance against prevailing positivism and scientism. By identifying McCloskey's starting point, consolidating the fertile visions contained in her all-out attack on "modernism", and by sometimes distancing themselves from the overly tawdry aspects of her 1983 manifesto, some authors - including in particular Roy Weintraub, Robert Heilbroner and Albert Hirschman - explore in greater depth the consequences of the rhetorical revolution in economics. "The Rhetoric of Economics" is available here for the first time in French translation.