ABSTRACT
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, political economy was remodelled as neoclassical economics and turned into a positive, abstract and deductive science. It typically studied choice in conditions of scarcity of means relative to desires. Again self-interest was redefined and now it was interpreted in terms of rational, maximising behaviour. This reframing effectively qualified greed as irrational, to be discounted from economics, sharing the same fate as pride had earlier. These topics only survived in the work of economists like Veblen, working outside of the positive-sum narrative. It was sociology that picked up issues relating to greed and pride.
