The Rhetoric of the Right: Language Change and the Spread of the Market (Routledge Studies in the History of Economics) - Hardcover

George, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0415679974 ISBN 13: 9780415679978

Publisher: Routledge, 2014

Synopsis

This study seeks to demonstrate the subtle ways in which changes in the language associated with economic issues are reflective of a gradual but quantifiable conservative ideological shift.

In this rigorous analysis, David George uses as his data a century of word usage within The New York Times, starting in 1900. It is not always obvious how the changes identified necessarily reflect a stronger prejudice toward laissez-faire free market capitalism, and so much of the book seeks to demonstrate the subtle ways in which the changing language indeed carries with it a political message. This analysis is made through exploration of five major areas of focus: "economics rhetoric" scholarship and the growing "behavioral economics" school of thought; the discourse of government and taxation; the changing meaning of "competition," and "competitive"; changing attitudes toward labor; and the celebration of growth relative to the decline in attention to economic justice and social equality.

About this title

About the Author:

David George is Professor of Economics at La Salle University, USA.

Review:

"David George’s The Rhetoric of the Right carefully demonstrates the dramatic rightward shift in elite rhetoric about markets and government over the last generation. Using a deceptively simple method―counts of words and word pairings in the New York Times―George teases out a rich story of how corporate executives came to be seen as creative "entrepreneurs", markets as universally beneficial, and government as distant and inefficient, rather than a democratically controlled means for solving basic market failures." - Jacob S. Hacker, Stanley B. Resor Professor Political Science, Yale University

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0415679974
• ISBN 13: 9780415679978
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176