ABSTRACT
Fifty years from now, when historians of ideas write about how economics turned away from scientism and toward science, they may identify the pivotal event as the appearance of Robert Solow’s article in Le Monde (3 January 2001) (Solow, 2001). This was his ill-fated attempt to calm the growing rebellion of French economics students against the neoclassical status quo. Solow’s article merely manifests, although with an alarming and attention-getting American imperialist twist, an ideology that has choked the social sciences, economics in particular, for as long as most of us can remember. Let me try to explain.
