This is a very combative book. In the right corner is economic modernism - big, bad, positivist and, as a matter of fact, masculine. In some other corner is Deirdre McCloskey who stands for - well, actually, what she stands for is not all that straightforward, as we shall see.
Economic modernism dominates contemporary economics.
Its practitioners radically differentiate what they do from literary studies or from softer social sciences. It highly values mathematical formalization, quantification, and statistical tests - particularly tests involving one or another regression procedure. To make her case McCloskey shows that the effectiveness of the leading figures in the discipline is enhanced when they stray from the modernist canon. It is not experimental or statistical tests that determine the acceptance of their arguments, it is the rhetoric deployed in making them. In his classic Foundations of Economic Analysis Samuelson sometimes used mathematics not because it is necessary to the argument but to impress.