A New Philosophy of History.

• Author: Craig, Lee A.

If you find the work of D. N. McCloskey on rhetoric and economics interesting and challenging, and I confess that I do, then you will probably consider A New Philosophy of History a valuable contribution to the history of thought in the humanities. If, however, you find McCloskey's work somewhat less than interesting, then you might want to move on, because the essays in this volume, written by notable historians, literary critics, and philosophers, grapple with many of the same issues raised by McCloskey. Needless to say, these issues are not typically covered in graduate training in economics. For example, the essays are organized in four sections entitled "Rubrics of Style," "Voice," "Argument," and "Image" - not exactly the nouns found at the core of today's leading debates among economists.

Although all of the essays are provocative, economists will probably find the ones in the "Style" and "Argument" sections more interesting, at least from a professional perspective, than those in the "Voice" and "Images" sections. In the "Style" section, for example, Nancy Partner offers a refreshingly candid essay entitled "Historicity in an Age of Reality-Fictions". She provides a list of "basic literary" forms employed by traditional (Western) historians (and economists for that matter); these forms include but are not limited to the author as narrator, the substitution of information for inspiration, the use of prose for extended narrative, and attention to causal relations. She observes that these devices are not legacies of the Enlightenment or the nineteenth-century intellectuals who supposedly formalized scientific analysis, but rather come from Greek and Roman antiquity. Importantly, Professor Partner includes incorporated fictions (her emphasis) among these ancient bequests. She concludes that collectively these devices produce an "appropriate protocol" among historians, and in a democracy, violations of this protocol lead dangerously to cynicism among the polity. One might add that violations with ideological roots and political objectives are especially harmful in this sense.

The "Argument" section contains two essays. One, Robert Berkhofer's "A Point of View on Viewpoints in Historical Practice," illustrates how easily critics of the white-European-male history substitute their own color-continent-gender history. To make his point, Professor Berkhofer quotes a number of passages (some quite lengthy) from critiques of traditional...