The discipline of economics: ambivalent epistemologies and the foreclosure of critique in elite economics education

Abstract

This article interrogates relations between dual senses of economics as ‘discipline’: as a form of knowledge and as a form of training. Scholars have suggested that economics performatively brings homo economicus into being. Yet this has been often posited as a singular figure, while eclipsing the unequal forms of personhood and sociality it instantiates. Through ethnography of elite undergraduate economics education in the United Kingdom, I ask how the ‘representative agents’ of homo economicus are considered ‘representative’, and how they relate to the forms of ‘agency’ that students cultivate. I argue that ambivalent epistemologies in economics oscillate between a-realism and what I term ‘brutal realism’, which appeals to epistemic prowess yet normalizes the partial perspective of a detached elite masculinity. Students are encouraged to foreclose critique to stabilize these unstable models; thus the multiplicity of representative agents paradoxically contributes to their traction. Meanwhile, students cultivate ethics of efficiency that facilitate this wilful blindness, shaping their trajectories into finance. I demonstrate that the authority of economics emerges through distinct affective, pedagogical, and epistemological forms, and there are multiple mirrors between these forms and the content of economics education.