1. Selling the Free Market: The Rhetoric of Economic Correctness
Houck, Davis W.
Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Volume 5, Number 1, Spring 2002, pp.
182-186 (Review)
Published by Michigan State University Press
DOI: 10.1353/rap.2002.0009
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2. 182 RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS
fiction. The authors claim that Carson’s successful adaptation of elements from the
science fiction progress narrative suggests that “the conversion of science to pur-
poses of human action may depend upon translation into a generally comprehen-
sible narrative framework and absorption into the mythology of the citizen expert”
(197).
Linda Lear provides an interesting conclusion with her discussion of the impact
of Carson’s image. Lear attempts to dispel myths regarding Carson’s persona as a
remote but heroic reformer. In contrast, Lear offers the image of Carson as “a more
heroic, far richer and more passionate woman than the world has thus embraced”
who can act as a model for “new ways to take risks . . . [and] build community”
(218).
The delightfully well-written essays in this volume contribute much to rhetori-
cal scholarship and our undernourished understanding of this important text. Each
provides an insightful analysis with well-argued and appropriate conclusions.
Although diverse, the volume follows a consistent logical progression as it moves
from traditional to newer critical approaches and from a contextual to a textual to
an intertextual focus. An addition that would strengthen its consistency consider-
ably but which is disappointingly absent from the volume is a discussion of the sim-
ilarities between the chapters. For example, a few essays identify the war metaphor
and the progress narrative as particularly forceful rhetorical elements. Identifying
connections between assessments regarding such tactics yields larger conclusions
that highlight the rhetorical importance of these essays. I believe that such a dis-
cussion by Waddell in the introductory chapter would have greatly strengthened the
text.
Despite this shortcoming, And No Birds Sing succeeds gracefully in carving a
well-deserved space for Silent Spring in rhetorical scholarship.
Caitlin Mara Wills University of Georgia
Selling the Free Market: The Rhetoric of Economic Correctness. By James Arnt Aune.
New York: Guilford Press, 2001; pp. xiv + 215. $23.95.
At one point in his highly informative and often entertaining book, Jim Aune has
this to say about rhetorical criticism: its purpose “is to identify the contradictions in
an ideology and thus show opponents of that ideology effective ways to target argu-
ments” (121–22). “Targeting” arguments is fun for the carni-scholar hanging out at
the county fair with time to kill and a thing for stuffed animals. But this same act
seems only very preliminary to advocating social change premised on social justice.
Jim Aune is no carni-scholar. He has better things to do than mindlessly pick off
slow-moving and often wildly conspicuous targets of libertarian free marketeers—
or even to “show” the Left how to do rhetorical criticism. And he proves that in his

3. BOOK REVIEWS 183
important book Selling the Free Market. Despite his purpose statement about
rhetorical criticism, it’s clear that Aune isn’t in this game for stuffed toys or for loud
midway kudos from the carni-barkers; no, as a father of two boys with autism (a
fact he makes clear for the reader), he worries about what his/their/our world will
look like should free market rhetoric continue to win the day.
Aune is both an optimist and a pessimist, and this ambivalence functions occa-
sionally to detract from the arguments that he’s trying to make. At the close of the
book, for example, Aune concludes with the rhetorical good news: that libertarians
generally are “inherently incapable of motivating the public,” and that the disciples
of Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, and Richard Posner
specifically “possess an inherent inability to persuade a democratic public” (170).
Leaving aside the vexing matters of whether someone can possess an “inability” and
the bell curve-ish biologism of inherency, the reader is left with that all-important
of question of: why bother? If Aune’s characterizations of the libertarians and their
thoroughgoing rhetorical ineptness is accurate, what’s the point, then, of writing an
entire book about their rhetorical practices? Why “target” libertarian arguments if
they have no audience? Aune almost talks himself out of a book project, and that
would be too bad because he has a great deal of note to say—about rhetoric, about
economics, and about their common points of intersection in our sociopolitical
present and future.
There’s a certain pleasurable thickness about reading Aune’s book; it’s not a
thickness synonymous with the ponderous prose that typifies so much academic
writing (and that results in what he terms “a radical slowing down”) but perhaps a
Geertzian thickness of description and explanation. Whether it’s U.S. legal history,
the intricacies of Austrian economics, the vagaries of Kenneth Burke and Karl Marx,
or popular culture, the reader comes away from Aune’s work having really learned
something in its complexity. And even though Aune writes unapologetically from
the left to left-center, he’s just as tough on his allies as he is on his enemies. Even-
handedness rather than shrill partisanship characterizes Aune’s characterizations.
Selling the Free Market is organized into three sections—–Rhetoric, Economics
and the Problems of Method; What Libertarians Want; and The Struggle over
Reagan’s Free-Market Legacy—–seven chapters and an introduction and conclu-
sion. Aune also includes a helpful appendix on the work of transgendered econo-
mist Deirdre McCloskey who, when she was Donald, began the “conversation”
among economists about the rhetorical turn. While McCloskey’s beef with the eco-
nomics discipline (and Aune is right: that beef is largely confined to the “blackboard
world” of the academic economist) was largely about epistemology generally and
scientism specifically, Aune’s concerns are with policy.
Aune begins by framing the battle over economic policy as fundamentally a battle
of rhetorical skills—and who will carry the day with the public. Much of the Right’s
success to date stems from “the left’s ineptness at communication and persuasion” (6).

4. 184 RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS
With effective public relations and a large bank account the Right has been winning
the game of public opinion. Part of Aune’s mission is to change that, not by freezing
bank assets but by debunking arguments.
In his first chapter, for example—“The Rhetoric-Economics Connection”—Aune
takes on the rhetorical appeal of rational choice, the master metaphor of economics.
Not only do rational choice advocates employ the formal appeal of the good story,
but their theorizing relies on two-variable analyses. This latter trick—a favorite of
my undergraduate microeconomics professor—invokes the rhetorical abracadabra
of “ceteris paribus,” or, for non-Latin speakers, “everything else being equal.” In other
words, we can quantify utility levels by comparing only two things and holding
everything else constant. It’s a neat trick, can be elegantly diagramed on an x-y
graph, and can be made to look exceedingly rational. There’s only one problem, and
Aune is right on the money: wealth maximization has little to do with social norms.
Instead, for rational choice theorists, wealth maximization is the social norm—the
only “rational” choice to make. In making this observation, Aune taps into a funda-
mental habit of thought of the rational choice crowd: who needs “mere” rhetoric
when you’ve got two measurable variables, a graph, a bit of calculus, and ceteris
paribus?
What’s so ironic about this view is that the brothers and sisters of the rational
choice theorists in the law-and-economics camp prefer to employ what Aune calls
the realist style. Two-variable graphic analysis is anything but realistic, but don’t tell
that to Richard Posner, federal judge and high priest of the law-and-economics
movement. As Aune describes in chapter 2, “Economic Rhetoric and the Realist
Style,” the polymath Posner should probably stick to law rather than rhetorical the-
ory. Rhetoricians in need of a stiff jolt of antirhetoric rhetoric should consult the
judge’s essay, “Rhetoric, Legal Advocacy, and Legal Reasoning” in Overcoming Law.
Rhetoric should stick to surfaces; let rationality and science do the deep work of legal
and economic analysis. Aune concludes Part I by nailing the rationalists where it
hurts: theirs is decidedly an undemocratic world, where choice, norms, and debate
are the negative externalities associated with that messy thing called democracy.
In the middle sections of the text, Aune analyzes several genres of work from the
libertarian elite: two speeches from Ayn (rhymes with “mine” as Aune reminds us)
Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia, and the
memoirs of Murray Rothbard and Charles Murray (of The Bell Curve infamy). Aune
does some of his best rhetorical criticism in working through the implications of a
disembodied rhetoric in Atlas Shrugged and how it functions as a “remarkably total-
itarian” text in which the reader’s response is carefully controlled from beginning to
end—a remarkable accomplishment for a novel that runs on for more than 1,000
pages. Readers will also find titillation in Aune’s biosexual-rhetorico reading of
Rand the sometimes randy author. More austere is his reading of Nozick where,
borrowing from Chaim Perelman’s work, Aune shows his reader how Anarchy, State,

5. BOOK REVIEWS 185
and Utopia functions rhetorically as a decidedly antirhetorical text—a theme that
the reader is now getting used to within the libertarian universe. Less cogent as
rhetorical criticism are Aune’s analyses of two libertarian manifestos, Rothbard’s
For a New Liberty and Murray’s What It Means to Be a Libertarian. What appears at
first blush to be an interrogation into generic form quickly turns into a thematic
critique of libertarianism pushed to its logical limits (Rothbard’s) and a more avun-
cular, but still “chilling,” version (Murray’s). Regarding this latter version, Aune
claims that he “has shown how a libertarian rhetoric can appeal to multiple con-
stituencies—old-fashioned racists, the digitally literate, business people, militia
members, intellectuals” (117). Aune hasn’t shown this; he’s asserted it. In so assert-
ing, he has not systematically worked through Murray’s polyvalent rhetorical prac-
tices to show how they work on an auditor.
Aune closes his book with two chapters on Ronald Reagan and his would-be
heirs Pat Buchanan and Newt Gingrich. The rhetorical tension that Aune isolates as
part of the Reagan legacy is unfettered global capitalism on the one hand and eco-
nomic nationalism on the other. In his fascinating look at the bizarre (yet com-
pelling) world of economic conspiracy theory, Aune walks his reader through the
dark side of the Federal Reserve banks, the Illuminati, and the one-world govern-
ment decried by Pat Robertson, to Pat Buchanan’s The Great Betrayal. Each propo-
nent (with the possible exception of Buchanan), interestingly enough, borrows
from Reagan’s rhetorical legacy of apocalyptic form. Buchanan, for whom Aune has
some non-ironic praise, attempts to rewrite U.S. economic history from the vantage
point of trade, arguing that it was Woodrow Wilson who helped bring free trade to
the country. In authoring the Right’s new narrative of economic nationalism,
Buchanan has also stolen what was once the Left’s most potent symbol: class. And
the Left basically allowed him, Aune contends, as they worried more about
Managua than they did about Flint. So, from conspiracy theory to a reasoned oppo-
sition, perhaps the Right has taken a page from that master poacher Bill Clinton, to
realign the ideological spectrum.
If Aune and Pat Buchanan have points of political agreement, perhaps we
shouldn’t be surprised to find that Newt Gingrich and various cyberpunk radicals
can also break ideological bread. The dominant discourse among Newt and the
cyberpunks, Aune argues in chapter 7, is the discourse of libertarianism, one that
both celebrates and denies human agency. With the rhetorical rapprochement of
the sixties counterculture and the free marketeers, Aune suggests that a New Class
hostile to big business and having alliances with the working class could gain ascen-
dency. And it is the New Class of the Third Wave that intrigues Aune; for as two cul-
tures are technologically bridged, the “old capitalist elite” might face a formidable
new enemy. We’ll see.
Aune closes with a brief conclusion in which he puts forward a positive eco-
nomic program for the democratic left—one that emphasizes the importance of the

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welfare state, strong unions, and regulation of financial markets. But these are not
ends for Aune; rather, such a coalition would function to preserve traditional com-
munities. A noble end, certainly. But one wonders, as per Aune’s previous chapter,
whether the entire concept of “traditional communities” is simply an anachronism
in our wired world.
In so many different ways, Jim Aune’s Selling the Free Market is an exemplary
book: it is well-written; it is witty and sometimes downright funny; it is written
from the honest perspective of an embodied, material person with real concerns; it
is theoretically sophisticated without employing a showy and jargon-laden vocabu-
lary; the arguments and evidences are interesting and important; and it engages sev-
eral different audiences both in and out of academe. Guilford has even made the
book affordable—an institutional context that rounds things out quite nicely. The
book will have a wide readership. It deserves as much.
Davis W. Houck Florida State University
Rhetoric as Currency: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the Great Depression. By Davis W.
Houck. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2001; pp. x + 226. $39.95.
Albeit catchy, the book is misnamed. Its scope and focus are primarily on Hoover
and Roosevelt and their speeches; on economics, especially in the introduction and
conclusion but less and unevenly so in the other chapters; and certainly not on cur-
rency as one normally understands that word—the term “rhetorical currency” is
listed once in the index and “currency” not at all. The title could excise “currency”
and substitute “health metaphors,” for much of the book discusses how both speak-
ers used health metaphors to resolve the Depression.
Chapter 1, the introduction, is devoted to economics and, to a lesser degree, its
relationship to rhetoric. Houck holds that “thoughts, beliefs, and emotions consti-
tute and create our economic realities” (4), which is accomplished through persua-
sive discourse. Curiously, this book is not situated in the so-called rhetorical
presidency or in any other rhetorical theories, classical or otherwise, but is con-
ceived best as a “journey” (11) through texts. Although the author discusses who
helped write the speeches, he is not particularly interested in how many drafts
ensued or who made what emendations or how the addresses were organized.
Except for metaphors, Houck also omits a discussion of oratorical style.
In chapter 2, which spans 1929–30, Houck catalogues Hoover’s many mistakes
in managing the art of rhetoric. He demonstrates that Hoover did not initially react
rhetorically to the Depression (27–29), but he does not suggest how Hoover might
have done so. When Hoover did finally speak, Houck travels the well-worn road of
castigating Hoover’s maladroit rhetoric in the early days of the Depression. But
Houck’s journey might have included some rhetorical revisionism on how Hoover