On Tue, 14 Feb 1995 18:47:26 -0800 Doug Henwood said:
>When did economists start (over)using the word "story"? Anyone know the
>pedigree of turn of phrase?
>
>Doug
>
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>Doug Henwood
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If you mean "story" as in "telling stories", I would imagine that
one proximate source is Donald McCloskey's stuff on "Rhetoric and Economics",
which has had some resonance and, I believe, also a positive reception among
some Marxoid sorts (largely clustered in western MA). Less proximate sources
might be the epistemological ramblings of a Richard Rorty and various
exceptionally banalized interpretations of French "Theory" which I gather are
still making the rounds in U.S. academia. (Of the suspects typically named
as having inspired the latter, I would guess that Lyotard bears the greatest
real guilt.) Anyway, whether indulged in by the "left" or the "right", the
usage seems to me extremely ill-advised. Given its cyclical character,
social reproduction doesn't lend itself to being presented (much less
*grasped*) in any of the forms that are typically thought to belong to
narrative and it's hard to say who exactly would be the "protagonists" in
the "story" of the dynamic tendencies of a *system*. I suppose if one had
a sufficiently voluntarist conception of economic life, with all significant
developments viewed as the product of initiatives undertaken from the
"controlling heights" of the economy, then the "telling stories" business
might make sense. But in that case, economic *theory* would become completely
otiose. And even then, the latter would have to be replaced not by "story-
telling" in the sense of arbitrary fictions, but rather political
(conjunctural) analysis and historical research, which certainly have their own
protocols of proof.
John Rosenthal
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