Economics enforced doctrinal conformity hardest after the Cold War ended

Evidence

During the Cold War, the economics profession was growing more exclusive, but was not completely intransigently intolerant of rival doctrines, for reasons of ideological appearances. For instance, evidence from the Paul Samuelson archives suggests he really did nominate Joan Robinson for the Bank of Sweden economics “Nobel.” Things really ratcheted upward in terms of imposed conformity only after the Fall of the Wall, for equally obvious political reasons. However, the apogee of denial of divergent thought occurred during the Great Bubble. A very strange literature sprang up in the early 2000s, asserting that there was no such thing as neoclassical economics anymore, in the sense that the legitimate orthodox economics profession had explored every possible analytical divergence from the rigid Walrasian general equilibrium model of days past, and someone, somewhere, sometime had built formal models addressing the previously heterodox concerns. Rationality? Who needs it? Equilibrium? We can do without it! Maximization? We can get around it! Individual greed? Just read Amartya Sen! Supply and demand? That just gets fed to people insufficiently mathematical to grasp the latest interpretation of the Sonnenschein-Mantel-Debreu theorems! Bubbles? We got ‘em, hot, foamy, and rational. Complexity? How much can you handle? And so on and so on. Point to anything you may not find salubrious, and we’ve got a “not-so-new” model (and maybe a bridge) to sell ya. And yet, all this putative open-minded tolerance and catholic heedfulness was accompanied by bald attack on and excommunication of any last vestige of heterodox economics in top-ranked universities throughout the world, and the redoubled exclusivity of top-ranked economics journals. History of doctrines was banished, and scattered ghettos of heterodox thought were unceremoniously leveled. Even European holdouts were vigorously routed in their national contexts. For those on the front lines, it was wrenching to witness this contradiction up close. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 63

Categorization

• QUESTION: The claim that Cold War ideological appearances restrained intolerance, and that the Wall’s fall removed that constraint, is a specific causal thesis worth verifying.
• SEED: The contradiction — marketing tolerance of every heterodox concern while excommunicating actual heterodox economists — is a striking essay angle on how ideological flexibility at the margins preserves a rigid core.
• XREF: The rhetorical catalogue of absorbed heterodox concerns connects to Mirowski’s broader ‘neoliberal thought collective’ argument and to Foucault’s conception of power absorbing its own critique. — connects to: Late capitalist culture enforces conformity more effectively than Stalinist censorship did — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 166