ABSTRACT
After Smith, political economy became caught up in controversies on order, progress and equality between reformers, Christian scientists and conservatives. Challenged, political economy remodelled itself into a deductive, abstract science. It focused on logical relationships between strategic variables, detached from their historical, moral and social context. The concept of self-interest was fitted for a new purpose. Instead of one among many passions, self-interest was assumed to rule supreme in economic behaviour and became the behavioural premise of an analytical model. Abstracting from other motives and its context, self-interest became indistinguishable from greed.
