ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the claim of realism to have set right the agenda of science and emancipation on a philosophically sound footing. The greatest empirical defeasance of realism, in capitalist economics, consists in its viewing production and consumption as individual rather than social activities, such that externalities and interdependencies are, assumed away. Critical realism goes well beyond the schoolboy stage of correcting epistemic errors, to the more fascinating task of discovering the generative mechanisms that produce the phenomenon of neoclassicism itself. The apparent rigour of mathematics was recruited avidly by neoclassicism to justify and defend its truistic, axiomatic, and almost infantile, theorems that deeply investigated but the surface gloss of economic life. Religious practice, for instance, is as real as economic or political practice, and generates its own set of illusions. The mythology of religion was soon to be replaced by the mythology of science, as science itself blessed the state and sacralised the world view(s) of capital.
