ABSTRACT
Of all the academic ‘disciplines’ which are representative of the modern, seventeenthcentury university’s pathologies and status as authoriser, creator, repository, and transmitter of productive truths – and virtually all are candidates – the discipline of Economics, or, more precisely, its dominant mode of neoclassical economics, is the exemplar par excellence. It is, at heart, unselfconscious and insufficiently self-critical, but also a vision-less, masculine and male-dominated discourse in such a state of disarray that it can only think of reform and improvement in terms of the very causes of its current condition – ever increasing levels of theoretical rigour – rather than a serious consideration of the principal fault which is its theoretical bankruptcy. Specifically, in its obsession with maximising behaviour as a foundation of human activity, it is crudely Newtonian and Darwinian in a Quantum age in which extremal theories of survival are, to put matters bluntly, wrong. Accordingly, its constructs are as disfiguring of the human condition as they are totalising; its habits, ethics, and disposition are marked by some of the worst traits historically found in professions which have given themselves to an ideology – intellectual evasion and predatory practice bordering on, where it does not unambiguously entail, insanity and criminality. The consequence for Economics, though it might also be justifiably seen as the cause of its malaise, is a crisis in which understandings provided by the discipline are inadequate to the phenomena it seeks to analyse.
