Overview

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.

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9781138791497

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Reviews

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

Author Information

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

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