ABSTRACT
Economics lives within a carefully constructed ideological fence designed to keep manifest reality at bay; within that well-endowed perimeter, its principal efforts lie in the flourishing cottage industry of turning commonplace, trite, ‘mathematical’ statements whose degree of difficulty is inversely correlated with relevance, realism, and meaning. At least since Ricardo’s time, economics has specialised in airy, inane model building, basing its vapid ‘discoveries’ putatively on the verities of inspired introspection, deductively mapping the dismal universe of human action, in the material sphere, in its own dark, dim and dubious light. Materialism was a bold modernist effort at severing the critical links between the economy and the larger matrix of culture. To rethink economics is merely a prelude to repudiating its despotic, self-fulfilling hegemony; in the yesteryear of nineteenth century classical economics, economics is simply the crown jewel of the ideology of capitalism, nay modernism.
