ABSTRACT
The sociology of economics explores how the epistemic authority of economics is produced, how it evades critique, and how it limits the range of policy options. This chapter discusses the debate on the ‘crisis of economics’ in 2008–2009 and outlines the two dimensions of the debate. It reconstructs the changing constellation of economic thought. The chapter shows how today’s orthodoxy was produced and entrenched, and why ‘critique’ and ‘reflexivity’ from a sociological point of view will not gain ground within orthodox economics. In other words, the chapter provides a narrative of why economics has become blind to its own construction and embedded epistemological assumptions. An analysis of the ‘collective imagination’ of economics, that is, an analysis of its ignorance, calls for a reframed sociology of economics. One way of proceeding to a sociology of economics is by means of discourse analysis.
