Selling the Free Market: The Rhetoric of Economic Correctness (review)

Selling the Free Market: The Rhetoric of Economic Correctness. By James Arnt Aune. New York: Guilford Press, 2001; pp. xiv + 215. $23.95.

At one point in his highly informative and often entertaining book, Jim Aune has this to say about rhetorical criticism: its purpose "is to identify the contradictions in an ideology and thus show opponents of that ideology effective ways to target arguments" (121-22). "Targeting" arguments is fun for the carni-scholar hanging out at the county fair with time to kill and a thing for stuffed animals. But this same act seems only very preliminary to advocating social change premised on social justice.

Jim Aune is no carni-scholar. He has better things to do than mindlessly pick off slow-moving and often wildly conspicuous targets of libertarian free marketeers—or even to "show" the Left how to do rhetorical criticism. And he proves that in his important book Selling the Free Market. Despite his purpose statement about rhetorical criticism, it's clear that Aune isn't in this game for stuffed toys or for loud midway kudos from the carni-barkers; no, as a father of two boys with autism (a fact he makes clear for the reader), he worries about what his/their/our world will look like should free market rhetoric continue to win the day.

Aune is both an optimist and a pessimist, and this ambivalence functions occasionally to detract from the arguments that he's trying to make. At the close of the book, for example, Aune concludes with the rhetorical good news: that libertarians generally are "inherently incapable of motivating the public," and that the disciples of Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, and Richard Posner specifically "possess an inherent inability to persuade a democratic public" (170). Leaving aside the vexing matters of whether someone can possess an "inability" and the bell curve-ish biologism of inherency, the reader is left with that all-important of question of: why bother? If Aune's characterizations of the libertarians and their thoroughgoing rhetorical ineptness is accurate, what's the point, then, of writing an entire book about their rhetorical practices? Why "target" libertarian arguments if they have no audience? Aune almost talks himself out of a book project, and that would be too bad because he has a great deal of note to say—about rhetoric, about economics, and about their common points of intersection in our sociopolitical present and future.

There's a certain pleasurable thickness about reading Aune's book; it's not a thickness synonymous with the ponderous prose that typifies so much academic writing (and that results in what he terms "a radical slowing down") but perhaps a Geertzian thickness of description and explanation. Whether it's U.S. legal history, the intricacies of Austrian economics, the vagaries of Kenneth Burke and Karl Marx, or popular culture, the reader comes away from Aune's work having really learned something in its complexity. And even though Aune writes unapologetically from the left to left-center, he's just as tough on his allies as he is on his enemies. Even-handedness rather than shrill partisanship characterizes Aune's characterizations.

Selling the Free Market is organized into three sections—-Rhetoric, Economics and the Problems of Method; What Libertarians Want; and The Struggle over Reagan's Free-Market Legacy—-seven chapters and an introduction and conclusion. Aune also includes a helpful appendix on the work of transgendered economist Deirdre McCloskey who, when she was Donald, began the "conversation" among economists about the rhetorical turn. While McCloskey's beef with the economics discipline (and Aune is right: that beef is largely confined to the "blackboard world" of the academic economist) was largely about epistemology generally and scientism specifically, Aune's concerns are with policy.

Aune begins by framing the battle over economic policy as fundamentally a battle of rhetorical skills—and who will carry the day with...