Rhetoric of economics is part of a wider current in scientific methodology, the study of rhetoric in science. It follows naturally from post-modernist approach to methodological issues, for analysing economics discourse provides a way to think about what economists are doing without passing judgement on it. These concerns have led Deirdre McCloskey and Arjo Klamer into literary criticism as a perspective from which to view economics. They have looked at language use in relation to authors’ purposes and the reading practices of the communities they are addressing. McCloskey produced a series of brilliant case studies from which she drew the conclusion that what persuaded economists was not empirical testing or successful prediction, but things that no explicit methodology took into account: mathematical virtuosity, arguments by analogy, symmetry and so on. The importance of analysing economists’ rhetoric was also stressed by Klamer, who started with a series of interviews, finding out how economists saw their work when talking about it in a more informal way. His conclusion, however, was similar. Theoretical disagreements were not settled by accumulating empirical evidence. At the end, much of this research lead into a discussion of the values held by economists, and of the way economic knowledge is created and conceived.