"Money is not a Pledge": Early Financial Genres, the Battle of the Banks, and John Law's Money and Trade Considered

A rhetorical analysis of bank proposals during the English financial revolution suggests that the discipline of economics and the modern willingness to trust its universally rational appeals grew from roots in specific historical exigencies that led financial projectors to craft appeals to partisan and divided audiences. Two features of the bank proposal genre—the plain style and abstraction—were perfected in John Law's Money and Trade Considered (1705), still read today as a work of economic theory. Analyzing Law's work in the context of other proposals and in the broader context of the financial revolution demonstrates the rhetorical foundation of modern economics.