CH: You talk about how the marketplace in modern society has replaced the worship of god.

JRS: What's fascinating is it happens very slowly. It creeps up from underneath the rational movement with the idea that what we require is specialisation. The idea that we need a lot of specialists, which we do, but that these specialists will have 'the truth' and once you have the field covered with 'the specialists' then all you need is a kind of heroic leadership to tell them what direction to go in, in the sense of the 'Bonaparte' version of life. In a way, what that does is it empties out the field of the idea that you and I can sit down and talk about things. That there are many possibilities and if we make a mistake we have to change our minds. All of that disappears –the idea of politics as a debate among people who disagree in order to find out what to do.

CH: In all of your books you focus on language –and how the technocrat essential creates, or the specialist essentially creates a system of language that is unintelligible to the outsider –to lock them out.

JRS: Essentially, you end up with these silos where, you now have millions –thousands and thousands and thousands of silos of impenetrable language controlled by small interest groups.

CH: Economics would be…

JRS: Well economists is the most classic example because economy is an area of speculative discussion. What you've seen, particularly since the second WW is gradually: its a class system, with an aristocracy, a middle class and a working class –a "lumpenprolitariat"– and the aristocracy were the economic historians because they understood the shape of the debate –what had already been done; where might we go? And then we had the, you know, solid middle class –those were the macro-economists who could 'do stuff' and micro-economists, who were 'slaves' or whatever, 'get me some numbers!' and what they did, at most universities was they did an intellectual cleansing of the economic historians to remove the possibility of 'doubt' –the possibility of speculation on ideas –leaving these sort of hapless –mainly hapless macro-economists who fell quite easily, frankly, into the hands of the ideologues –the neoliberals, neoconservatives. Let's face it, what is this ideology? An ideology of inevitability. An ideology based on self-interest. An ideology in which there is no real memory. At the end of the day, it's about power and money. (5:00)

CH: It's about making every aspect of society conform to the dictates of the market place. Which, as you point out, there's nothing, I think you say something like two or five thousand years of human history, to justify the absurdity that you should run a society based on the market place. (5:24)

JHS: Let me just take a tiny step back, as a historical marker, the day that I realised that the 'neos' were claiming that Edmund Burke was their godfather or whatever, I realised that we were into both lunacy and the denial of history. Because, of course, inspite of his rather crazy things about Maria Antoinette and the French Revolution, most of his career was about Inclusion, standing against slavery, standing for the American revolution, and of course, leading a fight for anti-racism and anti-imperialism in India – amazing democratic (?) –a liberal, in the terms of the early 19c, so when you see that these guys were trying to claim him, it's like lunatics today claiming Christ or Mohammad to do the unacceptable things. I think the fascinating thing is once you get rid of history, you get rid of 'memory' which they've done with economics, you suddenly start presenting economics as something that it isn't. You start saying, "The market will lead," and these theoretically "sophisticated" experts are quoting the "invisible hand" which is, of course, an entirely low-level religious image.

The "invisible hand of god" right - running the universe. As soon as you hear tham say, "Oh, that's what Adam Smith said," but when you talk to them, they haven't read Adam Smith. Adam Smith isn't taught in the departments of economics. You get quotes from Adam Smith - even when you're doing an MA or whatever, they don't know Adam Smith. They don't know that he actually was a great voice for fairness –incredibly distrustful of businessmen– and powerful businessmen. He said never allow them to be alone in a room together –they'll combine and falsify the market, and so on. So, what we've seen in the last half-century is this remarkable thing of big, sophisticated societies allowing the market-place to be pushed from say 3rd or 4th spot of importance to #1. And saying that the whole of society must be, in a sense, structured and judged, and put together through the eyes of the market-place and the rules of the market-place. Nobody's ever done this before.

CH: How did it happen? (7:53)

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Here is one valid answer to that question:
A great perspective on what happened to economics education - written in the middle of the Gilded Age, in 1897 - after the Depression of 1893, as featured by the Devon Henry George Society in the UK.

Economics: broken then and still broken now
The Science of Political Economy was Henry George’s final book and it was unfinished at the time of his death in 1897. In Part II Chapter 6 titled “The Breakdown of Scholastic Political Economy” George set out his views on the changing nature of economic teaching at the university institutions of his day. He was in fact observing the rapid descent of the subject of economics into a dysfunctional and malignant pseudo-science that has stood in the way of progress towards a just economic system ever since. The passage in question is worth revisiting so is set out here in full:

“Progress and Poverty [1879] has been the most successful economic work ever published. Its reasoning has never been successfully assailed, and on three continents it is given birth to movements whose practical success is only a question of time. Yet though the scholastic political economy has been broken, it has not been, as I at the time anticipated, by some of its professors taking up what I had pointed out; but by a new and utterly incoherent political economy which has taken its place in the schools.

Among the adherents of the scholastic political economy, who had been claiming it as a science, there had been from the time of Smith no attempt to determine what wealth was; no attempt to say what constituted property, and no attempt to make the laws of production or distribution correlate and agree, until there thus burst on them from a fresh man, without either the education or the sanction of the schools, on the remotest verge of civilization, a reconstruction of the science, that began to make its way and command attention. What were their training and laborious study worth if it could be thus ignored, and if one who had never seen the inside of a college should be admitted to prove the inconsistency of what they had been teaching as a science? It was not to be thought of. And so while a few of these professional economists, driven to say something about Progress and Poverty, resorted to misrepresentation, the majority preferred to rely upon their official positions in which they were secured by the interests of the dominant class, and to treat as beneath contempt a book circulating by thousands in the three great English-speaking countries and translated into all the important modern languages. Thus the professors of political economy seemingly rejected the simple teachings of Progress and Poverty, refrained from meeting with disproof or argument what it had laid down, and treated it with contemptuous silence.

Thus the professors of political economy, having the sanction and support of the schools, preferred to unite their differences, by giving up what had been insisted on as essential, and to teach an incomprehensible jargon, an occult science, which required a great study of what had been written by numerous learned professors all over the world, and a knowledge of foreign languages. So the scholastic political economy, as it had been taught, utterly broke down, and, as taught in the schools, tended to protectionism and the Germans, and to the assumption that it was the recondite science on which no one not having the endorsement of the colleges was competent to speak.

The new science speaks of the “science of economics” and not of “political economy.” It teaches that there are no eternally valid natural laws; and, asked if free trade or protection be beneficial or if the trusts be good or bad, declines to give a categorical answer, but replies that this can be decided only as to the particular time and place, and by a historical investigation of all that has been written about it. As such inquiry must, of course, be left to professors and learned men, it leaves the professors of “economics,” who have almost universally taken the places founded for professors of “political economy,” to dictate as they please, without any semblance of embarrassing axioms or rules.

Such inquiry as I have been able to make of the recently published works and writings of the authoritative professors of the science has convinced me that this change has been general, in all the colleges, both of England and the United States. So general is this scholastic utterance that it may now be said that the science of political economy, as founded by Adam Smith and taught authoritatively in 1880, has now been utterly abandoned, its teachings being referred to as the teachings of “the classical school” of political economy, now obsolete.

What has succeeded is usually denominated the Austrian school, for no other reason that I can discover than that “far kine have long horns.” If it has any principles, I have been utterly unable to find them. The inquirer is usually referred to the incomprehensible works of Professor Alfred Marshall of Cambridge in England, whose first 764-page volume of his Principles of Economics, out in 1891, has not yet given place to a second, and to the ponderous works of Eugen V. Böhm-Bawerk, Professor of Political Economy, first at Innsbruck and then at Vienna.

This pseudo-science is admirably calculated to serve the purpose of those powerful interests dominant in the colleges under our organization, that must fear a simple and understandable political economy, and who vaguely wish to have the poor boys who are subjected to it by their professors rendered incapable of thought on economic subjects. There is nothing that suggests so much what Schopenhauer (Parerga and Paralipomena) said of the works of the German philosopher Hegel than what the professors have written, and the volumes for mutual admiration which they publish as serials:

If one should wish to make a bright young man so stupid as to become incapable of all real thinking, the best way would be to command to him a diligent study of these works. For these monstrous piecings together of words which really destroy and contradict one another so causes the mind to vainly torment itself in the effort to discover their meaning that at last it collapses exhausted, with its capacity for thinking so completely destroyed that from that time on meaningless phrases count with it for thoughts.

It is to this state that political economy in the teachings of the schools, which profess to know all about it, has now come.”

The abridged version of The Science of Political Economy can be accessed for free online here.

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