ABSTRACT
People write the history of economics for a variety of reasons. Philip Mirowski reveals some of his own motivations in his "Confessions of an Aging Enfant Terrible":
Thus, when I read a particular economist's advocacy of regarding children as consumer goods, or another insists that Third World countries should be dumping grounds for toxic industrial wastes since life is cheap there, or a third proclaims that no sound economist would oppose NAFfA, or a fourth asserts confidently that some price completely reflects all relevant underlying fundamentals in the market, or a fifth pronounces imperiously that no credible theorist would recommend anything but a Nash equilibrium as the very essence of rationality in a solution concept, I do not view this as an occasion to dispute the validity of the assumptions of their "models"; rather, for me, it is a clarion call to excavate the archeology of knowledge that allows such classes of statements to pass muster, as aprelude to understanding what moral presuppositions I must evidently hold dear, given that I find them deeply disturbing.
