Ideology, power, and progress: Economics and its dilemmas

Abstract

The complex co-evolution of economics as a scientific discipline is accompanied by two dilemmas which are reflecting ambivalent effects of two ideologies: economism and scientism. Economics may go wrong when certain tendencies occasioned by those inevitable “ideological” influences are ignored. Pertinent problems include pseudo-rationalist conceptions of policy advice and the failure to deal with the limited status of partial analysis and abstractive dichotomies (notably allocation – distribution), the status of core concepts such as scarcity, instrumental rationality, exchange, and contract, as well as the related abstraction from power, distribution, and human sociality relevant for non-contractual interaction in various spheres of social life, including the market economy.