Economics became ‘pure’ by excluding class and history, yet justified state coercion.

Evidence

The insistence on objectivity was so relentless that it even manifested in the change of the discipline’s name, from political economy to pure economics. This purity derived from a savvy focus on a narrow range of elements: the economist dealt only with individual decisions of hypothetical rational beings, from which unassailable theorems could be deduced. Many economists do not even discuss human beings but a caricature of them, Homo economicus—the rational agent driven by self-interest—and his decisions aimed at maximizing utility. … At the same time, this “purity” sweeps away all historical institutions of the real economic world, forbidding questions about what should and shouldn’t be private property and how class relations need to be addressed. Most important, pure economics presumes eternal capitalism by avoiding the use of the term altogether. By elevating economics to a pseudoscientific discipline, the experts carried out a forced and methodical separation of the economic sphere of society from the political one. One might think that this separation would make economics a mere intellectual exercise. Ironically, it was this very separation that justified coercive intervention into society’s behavior. — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 214

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The paradox that stripping economics of politics enabled coercive political intervention is dense and worth sitting with — precisely Mattei’s ‘invisible order’ idea.
• DEFINE: Defines what ‘pure economics’ means and how Homo economicus operates as a rhetorical device.
• XREF: connects to: The ‘pure economics’ rebrand removed democratic scrutiny from economic policy — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 31; Pure economics expelled class analysis but smuggled class assumptions back in — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 1304