ABSTRACT
Eric Hobsbawm (1994) entitled his history of the twentieth century The Age of Extremes, reflecting the diversity and range of experience characteristic of the period, which closed with capitalism triumphant and under US hegemony. We hesitate before using Hobsbawm’s account either as a metaphor or as an explana tion for the extremes to which the social sciences in general, and economics in particular, have been driven over the last century. Nonetheless, the parallels are compelling as interdisciplinarity has given way to fragmentation into separate social sciences, modernism to postmodernism, and economics has become little more than an outpost of the US professionalisation, homogenisation and dominance of the discipline.
