Murray N. Rothbard, Intimidation by Rhetoric (1996)

Rothbard’s review essay examines Donald N. McCloskey’s Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics (1994), arguing that its methodological commitment to persuasion and open conversation operates as a means of insulating its author from criticism. The essay moves from a polemical assessment of McCloskey’s intellectual persona to two substantive disputes over economic scholarship, then locates the controversy within a wider crisis of economic methodology.

Rothbard associates McCloskey’s “Rhetoric” with hermeneutics and relativism, but his distinctive accusation concerns the authority conferred by literary reputation. By criticizing economists’ notoriously poor writing, he argues, McCloskey established a reputation for stylistic excellence that subsequently protected him against charges of incoherence. Rothbard reverses that presumption:

Ordinarily, if we find a writer, in whatever discipline, whom no one seems to understand, the onus will quickly begin to fall upon the writer himself: maybe no one understands him because he is incoherent, self-contradictory, in short, incomprehensible.

The point is not merely that McCloskey writes badly. Rothbard contends that rhetorical prestige changes how disagreement is adjudicated: failures of communication become evidence of critics’ limitations rather than possible defects in the argument. McCloskey’s shifting relationship to mainstream economics allegedly reinforces this immunity, allowing him to criticize neoclassicism while disclaiming the conclusions drawn by both its defenders and its opponents.

The central conceptual move is Rothbard’s treatment of openness as a potentially exclusionary norm. An apparently inclusive conversational ethic becomes, in his account, a way to classify dissent as intellectual incapacity:

And it is not very long into his discourse that we come to realize what, for McCloskey, is the practical definition of these two words: someone is “open” if they agree with him, “closed” to the extent that they disagree.

Rothbard’s comparison with Humpty-Dumpty sharpens this charge: control over the meanings of evaluative terms becomes control over who counts as a legitimate interlocutor. His own combative characterizations make the review a polemical intervention, but its underlying question is whether methodological pluralism permits criticism of its own standards.

The second half tests McCloskey’s scholarship against particular claims. First, Rothbard disputes the allegation that The Review of Austrian Economics excludes views other than his own. He rejects Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s departmental affiliation with him as evidence of doctrinal conformity and names published contributors whose positions contradict the allegation. This example turns the abstract defense of conversation into a demand for documentary verification.

Second, Rothbard challenges McCloskey’s portrayal of Joseph Schumpeter as a Whig historian committed to the progressive superiority of dominant economic theories. He acknowledges Schumpeter’s belief in intellectual progress and admiration for Walras, but emphasizes his account of a century-long theoretical regression under Smith and Ricardo. Rothbard then distinguishes Schumpeter’s criticism of Ricardo’s restrictive assumptions from a positivist objection to untested theory:

For Schumpeter’s criticism is not at all that Ricardo’s theory was not empirically tested.

On Rothbard’s reading, the “Ricardian Vice” consists in freezing much of an interdependent economic system, deriving nearly tautological results from simplifying assumptions, and applying those results to practical problems. This distinction supports his broader claim that McCloskey substitutes methodological labels for careful reconstruction of arguments.

The conclusion gives the review its wider relevance. Rothbard welcomes what he describes as the decline of positivism and the Keynesian–Walrasian paradigm because it creates space for competing approaches. Yet he insists that intellectual openness must preserve standards of evidence and conceptual precision:

But the flip side of this salubrious situation is that standards in general are lowered, and a lot of nonsense and absurdity gets to pass as sober and profound contributions to the discipline.

The essay thus presents rhetorical intimidation as a danger within methodological pluralism itself: the overthrow of an orthodoxy does not ensure that its challengers reason accurately or answer objections. Rothbard’s proposed corrective is sustained critical scrutiny, especially where appeals to openness threaten to replace substantive argument.