The Moral Rhetoric of Political Economy: Justice and Modern Economic Thought (review)

One of the major criticisms of public address scholarship is its tendency to fetishize the symbolic acts of individual rhetors over the broader sociological processes taking place in society. Largely because of its Aristotelian orientation toward rhetorical praxis, public address is frequently accused of providing an instrumental reading of rhetoric’s materiality, rather than deploying a more inductive approach sensitive to the spiraling interplay between texts and their material contexts. While not immune from this methodological problem, Paul Turpin’s book, The Moral Rhetoric of Political Economy, navigates this tension with respectable precision. Through a close textual engagement with two figures central to the political economy of economic liberalism—Adam Smith and Milton Friedman—Turpin argues that a series of “shared and ongoing foundational assumptions of justice” can be deduced from their rhetorical discourses (60).

Focusing on a distinction made by Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics, Turpin’s primary argument is that both of these thinkers represent a more generalizable cultural privileging of commutative justice over distributive justice. Whereas commutative justice promotes a restrictive vision of government that prohibits actions deemed immoral and unethical (such as the theft of property), distributive justice pursues an affirmative vision that emphasizes the redistribution of wealth based on a citizen’s cultural and historical relationship to society. Turpin also argues that both of these rhetors represent a broader rhetorical genre that corresponds to the political economy of economic liberalism. By consistently appealing to the decorum and propriety of their respective audiences, Smith and Friedman deploy a form of moralizing constitutive rhetoric that circumvents the criteria of critical/rational debate that they ostensibly embrace. Put differently, rather than utilizing instrumental persuasion to accomplish their goals, the moral rhetoric of Smith and Friedman has a world-creating function, removing the very topic of distributive justice “from legitimate public discussion as justice” (16).

Out of the two intellectual figures that Turpin analyzes, the majority of his time is spent critiquing Scottish social philosopher Adam Smith. Dedicating two full chapters to this analysis, Turpin begins by focusing on Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) and then turns to his liberal magnum opus The Wealth of Nations (WN). While Turpin’s astute examinations of each book yield their own rewarding insights, his most important argument begins to emerge when the two books are placed in conversation with one another. Turpin argues that, whereas historically scholars focused on the discontinuity between the celebration of empathy in TMS and the praise of selfishness in WN, the two books should be seen as actually building on each other through a common rhetorical privileging of commutative over distributive justice. Specifically, Turpin views TMS and WN as performing two distinct but interrelated goals. In TMS, Smith explains distributive justice in terms of an individual’s capacity to empathize with others and attain personal virtue. This rationalizes distributive justice as something outside the domain of public concern, and defines it instead in terms of a private practice limited to “persuasion in personal relationships” (57). WN, by contrast, teases out a general social theory from Smith’s work on virtue and empathy, subordinating distributive justice to the working of an innate market a priori that Smith calls the “invisible hand.” By implying that the good propriety and decorum of individual citizens will be enough to satisfy the allocation of wealth under capitalism, Smith’s invisible hand frames distributive justice as a problem that can be addressed without government intervention.

Turpin argues that Smith’s deferral of distributive justice to the domain of privatized morality operates at a similar level in Chicago School economist Milton Friedman’s best-selling text Capitalism and Freedom (CF). However, unlike Smith, whose moral appeals center around the tropes of empathy and personal virtue, Friedman’s rhetoric hinges on the trope of resentment. By framing distributive justice as a political attempt to infringe on the individual liberties of citizens, Friedman deploys a number of polarizing disjunctive arguments that...