ABSTRACT
Chapter 6 seeks to establish the best analytical way into the concept of marketisation. It examines the social scientific critiques of neoclassical economic theory, starting with Durkheim and Weber, and gives substance to the claim that sociology, and with it the sociology of religion, were founded against political economy. The chapter continues by surveying other critiques of the neoclassical model, such as that of Karl Polanyi, before attending to some of the radical critiques voiced by economists themselves. This allows us to situate the rise of the Rational Choice Theory applied to religion, and survey its critiques. The discussion then turns to enouncing the most radical critique of RCT and the ‘economics of religion’ current to date, arguing namely that if this theory is flawed as concerns simple economic behaviour (for instance, the purchase of a deodorant), as has been established by a landmass of social scientific scholarship, then how could it have even a remote interest for the study of religion? The rise of RCT then appears as the epistemological counterpart to that of the Global-Market regime, which it mirrors, thereby contributing to naturalise a neoliberal worldview just as the secularisation paradigm naturalised the National-Statist regime. In other words, RCT is a science-clad ideology, not a scientific theory. Instead, the chapter proposes a comprehensive, socio-anthropological theory of marketisation which avoids the problems inherent to most uses of market and branding terminology to date.
