As William James said of his Pragmatism, so one can say of Rhetoric: we find the rhetorical movement spoken of, sometimes with respect, sometimes with contumely, seldom with clear understanding. The Methodologists in the last chapter spoke of it with respect and with considerable if not complete understanding. Yet, as Warren Samuels has remarked, “there has been an uneasy tension in economics and in other disciplines between the advocates and practitioners of the traditional study of methodology and those who advocate the study of economics as the practice of discourse or rhetoric” (Samuels 1990a, p. 4). From certain Methodologists of economics, represented especially here by Alexander Rosenberg and secondarily by Daniel Hausman (cf. Vaubel 1988; Blaug 1987; and a few others), the reaction to a rhetorical turn has been a contumelious fury, as may be gauged by Rosenberg's titles: “Economics is Too Important to Be Left to the Rhetoricians” (1988a) and “Rhetoric is Not Important Enough for Economists to Bother About” (1988b). Not all of them, but a subset of the conventional Methodologists act like members of the American Medical Association facing a nursing practice act.

Samuels wrote in 1984 (now I think he would take a somewhat different view): “The study of economics as rhetoric … is no substitute for the appraisal of economics as knowledge” (Samuels 1984, p. 208).