The language of the liberal consensus: John F. Kennedy, technical reason, and the “new economics” at Yale University

Abstract

On June 11, 1962, President John F. Kennedy addressed the economy at Yale University. This essay explains the symbolic charge of his economic rhetoric, a persuasive campaign that enjoyed considerable success and marked the first time that a president took explicit responsibility for the nation's economic performance. I argue that the president crafted the authority to take command of the economy through construction of a liberal ethos, the use of dissociation, and a definition of the times. His arguments, in turn, were invented from the liberal matrix that dominated politics in the mid‐twentieth‐century United States and represent the ways in which that mode of discourse develops a historically contingent and politically powerful form of technical reason. President Kennedy's speech illustrates a set of strategies that can raise the status of one political language above its competitors in the process of public argument.

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