Metaphors, analogies, and other figures of speech are ubiquitous, and far from being mere ornaments they have heuristic, illustrative, analytical, methodological, or epistemological roles in scientific discourse. The present paper offers the prolegomena to a metaphorology of economic crises and business cycles, from the perspective of an historian of economic thought.
The paper traces a general historical outline of the usage of metaphors applied to these phenomena, and offers a characterization of the metaphorical transfer of features from the source domain to the target domain. It shows, by referring to storm and pendulum metaphors, how the selective transfer to crises and cycles of some properties rather than others contributes to define different, even incompatible, interpretation of the role of these phenomena in the working of the economic system. The study of the actual usage of metaphors (as opposed to a cataloguing of source domains supposed to provide a unique view of the target) is therefore important to throw light the tacit presuppositions on which the understanding of crises is based.