Economics as Ideology

Abstract

I take Mirowski’s brilliant summary as my charge, and I shall attempt to fulfill its demands by considering economics as ideology. Hence the first order of business is to clarify what I mean by this troublesome word.¹ As I have been at some pains to assert in my previous writings, I do not use ideology in a pejorative sense, as an apologia offered on behalf of some unannounced, usually political, interest, or as a description or explanation knowingly at variance with perceived reality. On the contrary, I understand an ideology to be utterances in which the speaker deeply believes — statements to which the “interests” themselves repair in search of enlightment. Ideologies in this sense are “social constructions of reality” in Berger and Luckmann’s (1966) terminology. They are conceptual frameworks by which order is imposed upon, and moral legitimacy accorded to, the raw stuff out of which social understanding must be forged (Heilbroner, 1973; 1985, Chapter 5; and 1988, Chapters 1 and 8.)

The first urgent issue in the philosophy of economics is the question of the intelligibility of a separate discipline devoted exclusively to the explication of an abstract concept called “the economy,” separate from other categories of social phenomena, and separate from the relationships we attribute to the physical or non-human world. These are the fundamental issues that any coherent discipline of economic theory must address: it must carve up reality, and must have some claim to have carved artfully “at the joints”; it must have some resources to adjudicate boundary disputes with other disciplines, which requires a clear conception of its own theoretical object; it must nurture some epistemological conception of the economic actor and the economist and presumably reconcile them one with the other; and it must build bridges to the conceptions of power and efficacy within the context of the culture in which it is to subsist.

— Mirowski, 1987, p. 1003