ABSTRACT
Introduction Our understanding of contemporary economies is contested: indeed, economics is a discipline in ‘schism.’ In post-war Western capitalist economies one approach-mainstream economics-has tended to predominate in university departments and policy formulation, with profound consequences. This ‘neoclassical’ approach emphasizes the efficiency of markets (except in isolated cases of market failure, e.g., public goods), rarely challenges the ethics of capitalist distribution (and initial endowments), adopts an instrumental view of rationality, and utilizes a narrow ‘positive’ methodology. Recent history exposes the problem this creates. Although in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) a critical economist, or healthy discipline, might have subjected such fundamentals to introspective evaluation, this has only really happened on the periphery of this approach, in its heterodox fringe. Perhaps a clue to why this might be can be found in the Postface to the Second Edition of the first volume of Capital, where Marx indicated a historical trend in the early nineteenth century which resonates with, and explains, the contemporary power of mainstream economics. He observed that the subject of class antagonisms, manifest in Smith and Ricardo, was forced into the background from 1830, with the emergence of an uncritical political economy:
It sounded the knell of scientific bourgeois economy. It was thenceforth no longer a question, whether this theorem or that was true, but whether it was useful to capital or harmful, expedient or inexpedient, politically dangerous or not. In place of disinterested inquirers, there were hired prize fighters; in place of genuine scientific research, the bad conscience and the evil intent of apologetics.
