Constitutive rhetoric is the idea that spoken language is a powerful force in the world that creates audiences and social worlds while simultaneously making and remaking language users. I employ the notion of constitutive rhetoric to investigate the character constitutions and communities invented by the rhetoric of economic inquiry in the work of Adam Smith, Richard Whately, John Stuart Mill, and Deirdre McCloskey. Though the character constituted by Smith, Whately, and Mill is that of the bourgeois character, as McCloskey has pointed out, the differences between Smith, Whately, and Mill are highlighted to show the way constitutive rhetoric operates as a process in three distinct cases. Additionally, I examine the different ways the work of Smith, Whately, and Mill continue to constitute character communities through the rhetoric of contemporary scholars, including, Deirdre McCloskey, Michael Ignatieff, Martha Nussbaum, Amartya Sen, Richard Rorty, James Buchanan, and Michael Novak. In Chapter II, I provide a short history of rhetoric and economics from the point of view of a history of rhetoric beginning with a re-reading of the Sophists. In Chapters III-V I examine the rhetoric of economic inquiry in Smith, Whately, and Mill, including the rhetorical presence of their ideas in contemporary times. In Chapter VI, I conclude by comparing the contemporary bourgeois character advocated so eloquently by McCloskey to the Homeric and Christian virtues. I also compare the present bourgeois society based on the work of Adam Smith with another liberal view of society as advocated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The comparisons reveal that the present constitution of bourgeois society and its social world is unlike a Christian society, and that a view of citizenship akin to Rousseau??s would help us to constitute persons holistically, rather than as separate selves.

From September 19th through October 3rd, 2008, Congress debated the largest government bailout in America history—the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (EESA). Those sixteen days generated a vibrant conversation regarding the nature and severity of America’s economic crisis and the proper role of government in responding to such juggernauts. In this dissertation I explore the rhetoric generated by this bill and its context in hopes of illuminating the more general role of rhetoric in mitigating and exacerbating crises in capitalism. My hypothesis is that, in a global capitalist economy increasingly dependent on immaterial production (i.e., finance, the Internet, mass media, etc.), economic crisis rhetoric has become as essential to economic order as monetary and fiscal policy. To explore this claim, I focus on two key rhetorical tensions that drove much of the crisis rhetoric produced. The first of these battles is a rhetorical struggle over the spatial delineation between Wall Street and Main Street, while the second is a conflict between Keynesianism and neoliberalism in a rhetorical contest over the values of government interventionism. By analyzing a variety of policy and expert discourses that constitute the parameters of these discrete areas of debate, I argue that all rely on moral and ethical appeals to substantiate their meaning and validity. At the same time, I contend that these discourses are indebted to logics of institutional form and therefore cannot be abstracted from the financial and political contexts in which they reside. This insight leads me to forward a new theory of economic crisis rhetoric called the economic imaginary. By beginning with real economic events and then taking into account the discursive and extra-discursive forces that “overdetermine” its mediated understanding, the economic imaginary offers us a more empirical and cartographic account of how economic rhetoric actually operates in society. / text