Stephen McCarthy

_Deductive Irrationality_ examines and critiques economic rationalism from the perspective of political philosophy. The essays in this collection analyze not only the work of founders of the discipline of economics, but also political philosophers influential in this founding and select contributors of seminal theories in modern economic thought—namely, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Adam Smith, Alfred Marshall, John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek, Gunnar Myrdal, Robert E. Lucas Jr., and John F. Muth. The main theme linking all of the essays together is that economics is a product of modern rationalism and shares with that rationalism the belief that the only real knowledge is scientific knowledge. Derived from a scientific method modeled on mathematics, this method gives both modern political science and modern economics their abstract character. Adam Smith's contribution to Western thought was more than mere economics; his innovations and his variance from previous thinkers follows Machiavelli in finding human nature in the realistic conception of examining men as how they are, rather than the classical view that we should look to the idea of man's formal excellence. To Smith, humanity emerges from a desire for self-preservation, where every worker competes to exchange the fruits of their labor with that of others. The result is a gap between the world of "common sense" and the world of theory that practitioners in both fields no longer truly understand. By adopting the perspective of political philosophy, the contributors take an approach that is alien to most economists, and in doing so address many of the currents and tensions that underlie modern economic theory and, by implication, the rational choice theory in political science.

Covering various fields in political science, this new book presents an historical and political-cultural analysis of Buddhism and Confucianism. Using Singapore and Burma as case studies, the book questions the basic assumptions of democratization theory, examining the political science of tyranny and exploring the rhetorical manipulation of religion for the purpose of political legitimacy. A welcome addition to the political science and Asian studies literature, McCarthy addresses many of the current issues that underlie the field of democratization in comparative politics and discusses the issue of imposing Western cultural bias in studying non-Western regimes by analyzing rhetorical traits that are universally regular in politics.

That rhetoric plays a major role in maintaining or transforming a regime should be considered an important element of regime analysis. Adopting an Aristotelian conceptual framework for examining tyranny and the rhetoric of tyrannical regimes allows us to understand modern, culturally specific, examples of political rhetoric while drawing general conclusions about the universal regularities of politics. Aristotle's cyclical account of politics contrasts and improves upon modern comparative development theory by acknowledging the real possibility of decay in a regime and, therefore, emphasizing the need to preserve stability in the regime by improving justice in the mixing of the democratic elements with the oligarchic. ;Drawing from Aristotle to develop the rhetoric of tyranny, I examine how rhetoric addresses the common opinions of the masses and how this conforms to the modern comparative analysis of the mass political culture. Enthymemes of tyrannical rhetoric seek to legitimize the preservation of order by appealing to the authoritative or religious endoxa in the political culture of the people. My purpose with respect to analyzing the rhetoric of the political elite in Singapore and Burma is: to show that by addressing the common opinions of the many, their rhetoric conforms to the principles of enthymematic persuasion in the Rhetoric; to challenge the examples used to support their enthymemes, and the truth of the common opinions upon which they are based, that is, to expose them as sophistry; and to show that their rhetoric conforms with Aristotle's advice for preserving tyrannies in the Politics. I find that the political leaders in Singapore and Burma have either invented endoxa or manipulated the traditional endoxa by altering historical accounts and interpreting Confucian or Buddhist traditions to conform to their political ends. ;Analyzing the rhetoric of benevolent despotism in Singapore and Burma produces some fundamental similarities between the rhetorical strategies undertaken by the leaders of both regimes. This includes the use of survival rhetoric and enthymemes that address religious or ethical codes deemed to be authoritative in a nation's political culture