The sociology or philosophy of science that economists bring to bear in thinking about their work, particularly their scientific work, and especially their scientific work in journals does not persuade. It is no more persuasive than their uninstructed literary criticism. To pick two, the cynical and the idealistic extremes, a journal is not a place of raw political power; nor is it a place where scientific hypotheses are subjected to decisive test.

A journal is where economists persuade. They persuade in beautiful figures of mathematics or of words or of statistics. The vocabulary and grammar of literary criticism can be used to think about their persuasion (Charles Bazerman has pioneered such studies in physics [1988] and has recently applied similar methods to Adam Smith [1993]; in biology Mulkay [1985] and Myers [1990] have done such work; and in economics Henderson [1982, 1993], Dudley-Evans [1993], and joint work with Hewings [Hewings and Henderson 1987, Henderson and Hewings 1987] and Dudley-Evans [Dudley-Evans and Henderson 1987, Dudley-Evans and Henderson 1990]). One can begin with the most obviously “literary” of what economic scientists do, their style. Style is character in prose and science depends on character, the ethos or persona that makes a scientist believable. Mary K. Farmer has pointed out, for example, that the tone in the New Home Economics or in the New Classical Macroeconomics “of doing what all economists agree we should be doing, but doing it more wholeheartedly” (Farmer 1992, p. 107) is a stylistic argument from authority, the authority of the tribe, Our Crowd.