ABSTRACT
The time is perhaps ripe now, at this juncture of the near-total triumph of the capitalist mode, and the apparent capitulation of the erstwhile ‘socialist’ bloc, to re-examine the corpus of ‘science’ that capitalism has arrogated to itself, not least in the form of ‘economics’. It should be obvious that not only is capitalism defended today as the best of all possible worlds1 (it being usually taken for granted that the matter is now empirically resolved beyond contention, in a Darwinian mode of argument, à la the so-called Alchian Thesis),2 both politically and economically, but also as the only system guaranteeing plural values alongside the rigour of a positive, objective science that is universally applicable. In fact, the so-called ‘scientific’ world view is often blithely equated with the European capitalist revolution historically, as though the Egyptian, the Indian, and the Chinese, to speak only of a few noncapitalist, and/or extra-European, scientific traditions, never existed.3
