Although largely conceptual, the book is an unequivocal defense of this new theory in the explanation of human behavior.

Is rhetoric just a new and trendy way toépater les bourgeois?Unfortunately, I think that the newfound interest of some economists in rhetoric, and particularly Donald McCloskey in his new book and subsequent responses to critics, gives that impression. After economists have worked so hard for the past five decades to learn their sums, differential calculus, real analysis, and topology, it is a fair bet that one could easily hector them about their woeful ignorance of the conjugation of Latin verbs or (...) Aristotle's Six Elements of Tragedy. Moreover, it has certainly become an academic cliché that economists write as gracefully and felicitously as a hundred monkeys chained to broken typewriters. The fact that economists still trot out Keynes's prose in their defense is itself an index of the inarticulate desperation of an inarticulate profession. (shrink)

Andreu Mas-Colell has been doing pioneering work using differential topology in the analysis of general equilibrium. This work is regarded as outstanding and one of the major contributions to the development of rigorous economic theory in the last twenty years. The articles he has written have been difficult and technically demanding. In this book he brings this work together to show its scope and its power. He presents the analysis in a way which makes it accessible to the broader range (...) of economic theorists and advanced students. This book has been long awaited as a seminal contribution to the subject. (shrink)