ABSTRACT
Bereft of scientific foundations for shrugging ontological questions of the very intelligibility of economic theory which resides in the causal properties of capitalism that reveal its economic life for the first time in history, neoclassical economics gives mathematical form to the doctrine of metaphysical harmony imbibed by Adam Smith and doubles down on Smith’s naturalizing of capitalism with claims of economic laws holding as do laws of nature mandating human subservience. In this endeavor neoclassical economics is supported by a model of science that itself tends to substitute logical symmetry in theory construction for substantive ontological enquiry. As neoclassical economic models desperately seek physics’ methodological parity they necessarily become ever more phantasmagoric. Yet notwithstanding the axiomatization and formalism of high physics models there is always the expectation of a correspondence between the logic of theory and what its theoretical object does in the open system of the world. In neoclassical economics there is no such expectation. Nor could there be given its shrugging of ontological questions pertaining to the historicity of its field.
