Introduction

Modernism as dirge; economic knowledge as its fossil remains. Borrowing from Max Planck with just the minor addition of his own bailiwick (substituting ‘economics’ for ‘science’), the doyen of modernist economics, Paul Samuelson, motivates even Keynes’s gloomy dictum about economics one step further in this cautionary epigraph, or epitaph, as the case may be.1

Economics is not only the ‘dismal science’. Its ascension to the level of the ‘queen of the social sciences’ is by virtue of one shovelful after another, as the ‘Darwinian impact of reality melts away even the prettiest of fanciful theories and the hottest of ideological frenzies’ (1997: 159).