Romanita: Reformation and Counter-Reformation in Neo-Classical Economics / Neo-Liberalism (Economics-as-Religion)

Michael McKinley

The Australia National University
Department of Political Science

International Studies Association

March 1998

Throughout the critical literature on the discipline of Economics (which is thought to be above specifying that it is neo-classical economics) there are occasional, wry, and bemused allusions to its theological, religious, and clerical dimensions. Only very exceptionally, however, are these passing references explored and developed in such a way that might aid our understanding of the Economics at the heart of Neo-Liberalism as something other than a perhaps promising but failed attempt to appropriate the standing and reliability of Newtonian physics. This is a pity because the twentieth-century development of economics is much more religiose than even the discipline's critical observers have imagined.

What this paper argues is that Economics has undergone two metamorphoses -- the first being remarkably similar to the path taken by the Protestant Reformation; the second being no less remarkably similar to that followed by the Catholic Counter-Reformation. Moreover, within these paths Economics has succumbed to the same general paradoxes and inversions which emerged in its explicitly religious precedents.

Thus, in the beginning we can discern a project which might be synoptically captured as the rejection of error, reformation, and renewal -- an implicit concern with The Resumption of the Divine. But, on closer inspection, this is made explicit: Economics is subject to a Rule as comprehensive as any found in the monastic orders. By also subjecting its dissidents to excommunication it gives rise to the suggestion that it has more in common with Rome than Wittenberg. And the similarities proliferate -- through paradoxes (a fascination with ordination and "priestly circles"); inversions (a turning away from science); and discontinuities (ruptures in the link with science and the canonical texts).

In all, it as though Economics followed the Reformation for a while, and then, when caught in the dialectic of its own development, became what it was originally most opposed to. As the reformation eventually spawned secularism and the interiority of religious faith and belief, Economics, a putative science, increasingly interiorised its belief in science and required deposits of faith from its adherents. Its disciplinary spirit is indistinguishable from that of the romanita -- the confessional imperialism of Rome, sustained throughout by legislation, admonition, and fiat.

Re-viewing the Present

The present and recent past are best understood as religiose moments. This is to say that, in the world's increasing embrace of neo-liberalism (and its core the theories of neo-classical economics) over the last two decades or more, for its political-economic salvation, there was a recognition of both grievous error, in the form of extensive state intervention in the economy, and the need to excise it and return to the purity of the free market as informed by the theories of neo-classical economics, a return, classically, ad pristinum statum (the state as it should originally have been), and to the status rectitudinus (the state as it should be). At first, and at best, this was no more than an insurgency against palpably failed and failing regimes -- in some cases corrupt regimes -- in the name of individual conscience, but it rapidly became, or at least was represented as, something more: the penitential struggle for redemption by a contrite people following their fall. Politically and intellectually, this mandated no less than a search, or, to be more precise, a rediscovery; and almost inescapably, because of the nature of the movement in question, it brought into being what Eugene Honee describes as a "double regularity of distortion and discovery." ₁ Such was the character of political-economic reformation theory and practice from (say) the early 1970s until the advent of the Thatcher Government in the United Kingdom, and the Reagan Administration in the United States of America. To the extent it was imbued with the spirit and cast of mind of Martin Luther and John Calvin, at its inception at least, the project is to be understood as Reformation.

To the further extent, however, that it fused the Protestant commitment to taking God (the market) very seriously, with the Catholic commitment to taking the Church (the profession of economics) very seriously indeed, the historical character of this religiose moment in extension is more precisely understood as Restoration and Counter-Reformation. ₂ Restoration comes to mind in the understanding of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) as the re-establishment of a universal Church on the basis of a parliamentary convention underwritten -- indeed, strongly persuaded, by force. Whereas the previous occasion, in the early 1660s, had secured the English monarchy, restored the established (Anglican) Church, and with it, church government by bishops, at the same time as it ensured defeat for contending confessions, and increased the political power of the propertied classes, the latter similarly legitimates the administration of global trade and the unequal distribution of global wealth in favour of the already-industrialised states through the Uruguay Round of the GATT, with its ladder of escalatory sanctions against all dissenters.

Even this framing falls slightly short of the acute understanding that is made possible by persisting in the historical correspondence. The WTO, we know, was established for the very purpose of interpreting the Word as laid out in the GATT texts, and conversely, to prosecute any attempts to introduce, reintroduce, or tolerate competing or co-existent political-economic ideas and practices. Functionally, it is to be little distinguished from the Reformation rejection, and then anathematisation of, the Hellenic dimension of Renaissance culture, Scholastic philosophy, and the greater part of post-apostolic Christianity. But, of even greater significance, its uncompromising nature is entirely consistent with that regime of confessional imperialism known in this century as the romanita -- which, defined narrowly, is the spirit or influence of the authority of the Roman Catholic Church, and the acceptance of papal policies. Its ways, pre-date this usage, of course, and are, accordingly, as well known as they are historically effective and politically infamous: in the words of Morris West, legislation, admonition, fiat, sustained throughout by magisterium, auctoritas, potestas -- the office, the authority, the power to use them both. In terms of a broader political and social understanding, however, it is a form of atavism, a re inscription of an ancient habit of "prescribing a juridical solution to every human dilemma, and then stamping every solution with a sacred character under the seal of the magisterium ." ₃ By any comprehension it is a return to rule by a form of political-economic absolutism.

Dogmatic renewal, conservative and reactionary in its hue, appears, therefore, to define the particular character of the present. Borrowing from Richard Tarnas, we can see that the proponents of neo-classical economics / neo-liberalism, like those of the Reformation, successfully waged their insurgencies against all incumbent regimes in the name of personal freedom, but, in their success, they institutionalised and routinised their vision --thus incarcerating it. ₄ What began, in declaratory and philosophical terms at least, as a celebration of individual conscience, became a temporal power which is served by, and is dependent upon, a belief system. Indeed, this was inevitable since the rise of neo-classical economics coincided with, and was primarily dependent on, the restorative needs of the United States. And, because of its absolutism, dialogue with the romanita , like the dialogue between the various, competing absolutisms regnant in Europe between the posting of Luther's ninety-five theses on the door of Palast Church in Wittenberg in 1517 and the Peace of Westphalia 131 years later, conforms to Stephen Toulmin's graphic portrayal of the latter years in this period -- "active, bloody, and strident." ₅

That the theory and practice of neo-clasical economics should be identified as religiose should not surprise; nor, at some levels of analysis should it be seen as original. Writing of their "inability to see government as the justifiable force of the citizen," and their blindness to "an actively organised pool of disinterest called the public good," John Ralston Saul refers to the "religious devotion" which market theorists such as Friedrich von Hayek brought to their work. ₆ Notably, from within the profession, a respected econometrician, Edward E. Leamer, wrote two articles on his own specialist area which unambiguously point to an identification with religious belief and the clergy. Thus he locates within econometrics a comfortable dichotomy between a "celibate priesthood of statistical theorists, on the one hand, and a legion of inveterate sinner-data analysts, on the other." ₇ Both, indeed the whole profession it seems, in its pursuit of scientific objectivity, have fallen prey to a "false idol." ₈ He continues in this vein:

The priests are empowered to draw up lists of sins and are revered for the special talents they display. Sinners are not expected to avoid sins; they need only confess their errors openly. . . . . . .

Even more amazing was the transmogrification of particular individuals who wantonly sinned in the basement [where economic modelling was carried out] and metamorphosed into the highest of high priests as they ascended to the third floor [where economic theory was taught]. ₉

Never the less, what might be seen as both original and politically potent, is the casting of economics within a sustained analogy with the Reformation and its alter ego, the romanita . To do so is to discern, first, the strength of their common objective -- the ultimately futile compulsion to know the mind of God, and its economic equivalent, the Market. -- in effect to accommodate to a more sophisticated form of ignorance. It is, then, to understand the common persistence of what John D. Caputo defines, in the context of Catholicism, as Eucharistic Hermeneutics: in the New Testament, the accuracy and authenticity of the divine plane are effected by the celebration of the Eucharist, itself a repetition of the Last Supper and the post-Easter appearance of Christ to the Apostles on the road to Emmaus (and his interpretation of the scriptures with great clarity ₁₀ ); in these times, suggestively, it is the conflation of the US victories in World War II and the Cold War, which provide the redemptive auto-hermeneutics in the texts of Western economics. (Here, Luther's rediscovery of the Judaic purity in early Christianity, is complemented by economics' rediscovery of the late nineteenth, and early twentieth century neo-classical texts in the sense that both were prized as the basis for intellectual, spiritual, and later, material, independence). Finally, it is be alive to the duality of Eucharistic Hermeneutics because in its ability to silence the dissenter within the idiom of her, or his choice, dissent is broken upon the back of dogma. For this Caputo reserves the term "terroristic hermeneutics." ₁₁

Even then, it becomes necessary to acknowledge not just the correspondences between the two historical movements, but also the inversions which make a mockery of neo-classical economics' pretensions to being, in any real sense, a reformation. It is to understand that, just as the Reformation declared itself to be about the liberation of the individual conscience, it contained within itself a totalising evangelical impulse no different to that which imbues modernity in general, and capitalism in particular. The conviction that salvation is to be achieved through a certain type of confession is unlikely to be modest, especially in ages in which a communications revolution is being effected. ₁₂ Neither a Church proclaiming to be One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic, nor another preoccupied with humanity's nature and God's judgement, should be thought other than superficially different on this question. By the same criterion, neither should an economic belief system thought to have the same salvational powers as both of these declared they had. That this required no change by the Catholic Church (since it was by definition universal), and an emulation of it, evangelically speaking, by the Reformation churches, was, in a way, logical: both believed the other to be in error, to be risking the mortal souls of their co-religionists by advocating heresy. In economics' arrogation to itself of the totality of economic inquiry, when it covers only the mainstream, authorised, neo-classical study of capitalist economic theory and practice, we can find, coterminously, the arrogance of Rome, in harness with apostolic zealotry.

Significantly, in the case of both the Reformation and the turn to doctrinaire neo-classical economics, closure was imposed, but for profoundly different reasons. The effect of the Treaty of Westphalia, which followed decades of war, made a major concession to difference as well as conscience by allowing the rulers of Europe not only to establish the denomination of their respective territories, but also to be indifferent to the views of other creeds in other territories; the Uruguay Round of the GATT, however, preceded as it was by over four decades of a Cold War defined by a neo-Augustinian dualism, effected an inversion by restoring at the global level what the Peace of Westphalia, and before it, the Treaty of Augsburg (1555), and the Edict of Nantes (1598), had been studiously determined to avoid -- an absolute moral sovereign.

Such are the dominant colourings, shapes and themes of the turn to neo-liberalism / neo-classical economics which demand greater attention if the dangers inherent in it for global politics are to be understood. In turn, therefore, seven facets within four foci of traverse from reformation to romanita will be addressed: the first three -- the rejection of error, reformation, and renewal, are encompassed within a project that might be seen summarily as the resumption of the divine. The analysis then embraces the role and importance of thinking and acting as a religion, of which the resumption of the divine is symptomatic for the religious and economic movements undertaking it. Indeed, within this specific focus on the religious nature of economics, both are unsurprisingly integrated to the significant extent they induce theological and political-economic theory and practice of a conservative character. Relatedly, but given separate and particular emphasis in this context is the regime of terroristic silence which is threatened, and actually imposed, should a dilated sense of dissent exceed the contours of a misleadingly described free will and individual conscience. It follows that the paradoxes which reformation gives rise to, and their attendant inversions and discontinuities which exist beyond them, comprise an appropriate and necessary termination. When taken together with the other six foci, they make plain that what has occurred is less reformation -- in the common contemporary sense of improvement or progress -- but a return to a discredited and unacceptable former state of affairs. ₁₃

The Resumption of the Divine: Rejection of Error, Reformation, and Renewal

John Kenneth Galbraith has observed that "financial genius is before the fall." ₁₄ A similarly invariable rule, in religion as in economics, is that reformation and counter-reformation are always after the fall, the fall itself being the consequence of, to use another of Galbraith's apposite phrases," a serious commitment to error." ₁₅ The rejection of error which accompanies reformation, moreover, is tridental, comprising the radical excision of faults and abuses in the godhead, the self, and the mediations between them both. To this end it is to be noted that both the Reformation and neo-classical economics are optimistic concerning their respective understandings of the external deity, the austere God of Judaeo-Christian tradition and the free market, but entirely pessimistic in relation to the construction of the individual within the discourse of the extant religion. Thus rejected is the autonomous individual of Thomistic theology, who participates in "God's infinite and free essence, and assert[s] the positive, God-given autonomy of human nature," and correspondingly, all concepts of the individual other than Rational Economic Man, on essentially the same grounds, namely, that they miss the point about both the Almighty and the individual's necessary subjection subjection to it: it is obedience to God's will that is imperative, and it is obedience to it that constitutes true freedom and joy, not the freedom to act in accordance with a fallen nature and an "inherently ineffective and perverse" human will. Further, learning, as well as accommodation to, and incorporation of, existing traditions of belief into an organic religious faith and practice relevant to time and place are renounced as nothing other than apostate interventions between the individual and God. ₁₆

Mediation is by these accounts an error in itself and the cause of proliferating error. In the "contamination" of Scholastic theology by Greek philosophy is the precedent for the renunciation of all classical economic thought revised by such heretical formations as Keynesianism, and welfare statism. Moreover, driving these renunciations is the animus for a creed which is too worldly, in that it both influences the temporal realm and recognises it, accepts it, as an integral theatre of operations. Two consequences of immense importance follow from this turning away: the first is that the puristic enthusiasm which governs them drives out the potential for critique from a human perspective because both "contaminations" leaven the metaphysical with the critical; ₁₇ the second is that they are, intentionally, attempts to move beyond the human standpoint for the purpose of, in Caputo's formulation, and "reattaching . . . to an absolute Origin." In this they display a neurotic preoccupation with the gap, the loss of an absolute intimacy, between an imperfect humankind and the Almighty, which they believe will be overcome if only a point in the (always in the) past can be found "where heaven and earth intersect and some moment in time gets charged with eternity and absolutely foundational value." ₁₈

This attempt to resume the divine by merging with it is as recurrent a theme in religion as it is in economics licenses two appropriate equivalences, the first being that the judging God of the Reformation, and the austere Market are indistinguishable in their origins, the roles they serve, the commitments they extract, and the mercies they bestow. While the former affirms the God of Abraham and Moses as "supreme, omnipotent, and transcendent," and takes its collective name ("Christian") from the corporeal expression of that God, the latter's "theological" and "classical faith" proclaims a Being that is equally totemic -- "free marketeer" being the badge of identity -- and without fault. Here, Peter Preston's analysis of the modes of economic-theoretical engagement with regard to the market provides an extremely valuable complement to the sources consulted on economics and religion in general and the Reformation's view of God in particular. ₁₉

In the first instance, both the God of the Reformation and the Market are the historical results of quite specific episodes, a fact which, never the less, has failed to deter their claim that "their categories, values, and mores alone are eternally valid." ₂₀ They exist, therefore, as givens, "largely independent of human kind, whose multiple individual efforts generate [them] as a kind of all embracing epiphenomena." Similarly, knowledge of the type which would permit a concerning them which would allow a designed, intelligent engagement is humanly "unavailable a priori;" all that might be forthcoming is sufficient enlightenment to the individual so that she or he might be accommodated to their purposes. ₂₁ This being the case, Church and State are excluded from any substantial directive role in religion and economics, respectively; indeed, such are their inadequacies that any attempt to do so is deserving of contempt. Both, accordingly, are confined within the parameters of the liberal, minimalist institution which, while extending to the faithful the right to wide-ranging belief about their objects of veneration, anathematise all understandings of the subject of veneration which do not conform with the proclaimed, essential, revised, standard individual. In effect this is a double return to the Monophysite heresy of the sixth century; then, however, the debate, and subsequent schism, was limited to the claim that there is only one, inseparable nature in the person of Jesus, whereas, in the rise of neo-liberalism, both the Market and its human subject are progressively linked with a single understanding of God.

Such a construction of a model of humankind, with its concern to describe the world as it is and ought to be, deploys for its own purposes what is termed "philosophical anthropology." By its light, furthermore, a model of ethics is derived against which all behaviour might be measured, or at least judged against the criteria of an externally supplied Rule. Effectively, what obtains is a "theo-tendential" orientation whereby all reality is seen according to the measure it reflects the ideal of the model -- the God in whose image and likeness humankind is made, and the rational, calculating individual, depending on the immediate context. Thus virtue rooted in faith and economic efficiency correspond as the respective practices which externalise the metaphysical axes of intelligibility provided by the original model. ₂₂ Disasters which befall individuals and groups are, therefore, the result of "some abuse" which, by definition, resides somewhere external to the market -- effectively, in the impiety of those groups and individuals. ₂₃

Clearly, common in this formulation is the nature of the individual. For both Reformation Protestantism and the Market this is a problematic construct because they posit a person who is defined by their private wants, which are to be saved in the next life, and satisfied in this one. Yet, at the same time, she or he is both the cause and the effect of the relevant god, being systemically necessary for both individual demand (which is assumed) and its satisfaction. (Expressed another way, if there was no demand for an after-life in paradise, and if there were no consumer wants a la capitalism in the first place, then neither God nor the market would be required to satisfy them.) Within this conflation of assumption and objective, the nature of the individual is further reduced by holding that she or he accepts that the satisfaction of the assumed demands be reduced to the single index of price -- which translates as an unremitting faith in both God and the Market. The individual in question is, therefore, a diminished being as regards sovereignty in the eyes of the Reformation and economics. Contrary to the free will which is conceded by both the Reformation and popular neo-liberal notions, the sovereignty with which the individual is invested, dissolves immediately on the reflection that, given the above conflation, she or he is more accurately understood as the essentially passive receiver of stimuli in a productive system which creates the very wants it satisfies. ₂₄

The second consequence of the attempt to resume the divine is the identification of prayer and work as synonymous in their respective realms; both serve as supremely cognitive utilities. To be sure, it has long been recognised that work, like prayer, is a moral activity, but the extent to which they are almost identical exercises in discipline and subordination is not so well understood. Both are external expressions of faith, which, by their devout practice provide temporal assurance to the autonomous individual that she or he is living virtuously according to a pre-existing, supreme order. To the extent that these practices are buttressed by authority (scriptural and scientific), and spiritual well-being and wealth are held to be consequent upon them, reassurance is available; it is equally inescapable that, to the extent inequality exists in the distribution of benefits, the causes are internal, with the subject, and not with either God or the Market, both of whom are without fault.

Additionally, because prayer-as-an-expression-of-faith and work are conversations with the Origin, they are concerned with how individuals are to live, and how they are to give an account of themselves. More precisely, conducted in the spirit of the appropriate subordination, both are the living rejection of indulgences by, and through, an activity embedded in the godhead. Indeed, unless one already knows the provenance of the following statement, could one confidently know whether the description "a moral obligation that projects religious behaviour onto the everyday world" defines prayer or work? ₂₅

Since nearly all people work, and work is a moral obligation, there is something clerical about work. Through an emphasis in Weber, again, we understand the moral ideal of hard work as a calling, and, through this association, summon up Luther's notion that the body of the church consists of the "priesthood of all believers," who are analogous in their labour to the contemplative orders of the Christian church whose central calling was to pray. ₂₆ Prayer and work, furthermore, tend to be disciplined and regular, for which comparison we need look no further than the extraordinary conjunction of both in the term "office" -- which, in its many but complementary meanings, blurs the distinction between the two activities. While it is true that a distinction can be made in terms of the one being (religiously) a divine service, and the other being (secularly) a place of business, the difference collapses as the common extensions embrace meanings such as the performance of a task, a duty or service, or the a religious or social observance.

Within this identity where prayer and work merge, and for the same acknowledged purpose, there are no grounds for the religiously or economically pious to refuse to perform their office. Just as no prayer goes unheard, no work is too degrading or insignificant because, whatever the task, as exercise in virtue, they create the possibility of an undeserved redemption; it follows that the obligation to pray and to work are absolute, and the refusal to do so is a refusal of the grace -- defined as the free and unmerited favour of God and the Market -- necessary for entry into paradise in the next life, or for continued participation in the cycle of wants and satisfaction in the present. Expressed negatively, not to pray or compete is to guilty of the sin of presumption by implying that redemption and satisfaction will be realised without in any way acknowledging the need for an external manifestation of the requisite faith. Even then, grace is a commodity which can be denied by God and the Market (since it is a concession in their gift), but cannot be refused by an individual needing to remain in communion with both.

In this light, grace and disposable income equate, and with a certain irony. In Reformation theology, grace is absolutely degraded by God's inscrutable calculation as to whether an individual has faith, and the uncertainty of this outcome is an unceasing torture for her, or him, throughout life. The Market imposes a different, but no less chronic, dissatisfaction, or rather, it is more correct to reiterate that the Market's success is monument to the conscious and enduring way it creates, organises, and orchestrates the wants it purportedly satisfies, ad infinitum. The rejection of error, is thus a rejection of most of the comforts which make life more bearable in favour of an existence defined by austere suspension.

If life as it lived is continual deferral to a future objective, the regime under which life is lived is a continual deferral to some point in the past. The movement, in the first instance, is away from the present with its moral decline and abandonment of truth, in obedience to the injunction penned by Paul in his letter to the Romans -- Nolite conformari huic saeculo, sed reformamini (do not conform to this world , but reform Thyself) ₂₇ -- to a period of authenticity co-located with a canon of order which can only be found in the past. Second, it is a movement designed primarily to renew, and thus potentially redeem, the individual, the inner person; social reform, it is held, proceeds from this in a causal relation. ₂₈ Under this "law of the return" the tendency is to revert to the earliest examples of the norm that is being sought, which, almost automatically, will involve a distortion arising from the compound of intense disaffection with the present, and a vision of an innocent, pure, unspoilt ecclesia primitiva. In the Reformation, specifically for Lutherans, the return was codified in the Judaeo-Christian Confessio Augustana, and can be seen, accordingly, as slightly exceptional to the law; ₂₉ in the reformation of economics the same qualification applies to the extent that it alighted, less in a primitive utopia and more in that "point in the past where heaven and earth intersect" defined by mathematical economics and Rational Economic Man, or, to put it more obviously, at the meeting between God's mechanics and the lower being made in His image and likeness.

Strictly speaking, if reformation connotes a return to "either a predetermined norm or a former state, economics did not engage in one, whereas it might legitimately be said to have engaged in a transformation. At issue here is a certain looseness of terminology in which reformation and transformation have become a synonym for each other. ₃₀ As has been argued elsewhere, one of the closest (of perhaps many) approximations to a neo-liberal economic state was the Scottish clan system which expired at the Battle of Culloden in 1746, but, globally, there has simply been no, albeit rough, precedent for the global regime that is neo-liberalism. ₃₁ This, however, does not invalidate the comparison; rather, it points to the pitfall of distorted discovery noted by Honee in the attempted return to an idealised past state in religion and, as evidenced in the foregoing, economics.

The Religious Nature of Economics

To argue that the reformation engaged in by economics closely followed the Protestant Reformation, by attempting to resume the divine, and that various constructions within economics and religion are status, role and functional equivalents of each other still leaves open the question of how we might understand economics in terms other than those it provides for itself. The proposition here is that the answer is surprisingly clear: economics is not like a religion; it is a religion, and it is politically prudent to understand it as such. Beyond a brief definitional exegesis, this argument is framed by further referring to economics as a system of a particular type of belief, the role and importance of that belief, and the integration of it with conservative thematics in Christian (especially Reformation) theology.

For present purposes religion is minimally defined as comprising a belief in, and a recognition of, by humankind, of some higher unseen power which has control of its destiny, and is entitled to obedience, reverence, and worship. Such recognition, furthermore, is thought to be self-evidently true, and exclusive of any competing beliefs, such as those bequeathed by custom. Confessing this belief -- i.e. accepting and declaring it as the standard of spiritual and practical life with maximum human fidelity -- is an absolute obligation. Such a recognition, also, explicitly contains the admission that humankind is severely limited in its ability to understand the world, in whole or part, with clear consciousness, and has, paradoxically, and according to an imperfect "rational" process, constituted a realm of infinite explanatory power which never the less cannot be accessed. The term religion also extends to the particular system of such belief.

To begin, there is virtually no serious challenge to the proposition that economics is a system of belief. Moreover, what its reformative project suggests -- that it is religious in character -- is conceded by some of the discipline;s most knowledgeable and authoritative figures. Leamer's clerical metaphor was cited earlier, but it is in the commentaries of John Kenneth Galbraith that are found some of the most telling insights into its essentially ecclesiastical identity, the latter's work being especially accessible via a penetrating and wide-ranging essay by Warren J. Samuels. Through (once again) philosophical anthropology Galbraith is unequivocal regard its origins and utility:

Man cannot live without an economic theology -- without some rationalisation of the abstract and seemingly inchoate arrangements which provide him with his livelihood. ₃₂ For this purpose the competitive or classical model had many advantages. It was comprehensive and internally consistent. By asserting that it was a description of reality the conservative could use it as the justification of the existing order. For the reformer it could be a goal, a beacon to mark the path of needed change. Both could be united in the central faith at least so long as nothing happened to strain unduly their capacity for belief.

Elsewhere, as Samuels demonstrates, Galbraith attributes a generally Reformationist, specifically Anglican cast to the tolerance which this economic theology extends: "Within a considerable range he [Man] is permitted to believe what he pleases. He may hold whatever view of this world he finds most agreeable or otherwise to his taste." ₃₃ But the unmistakable conclusion drawn by Galbraith is that the supporting faith reposing in economics, which defines nothing less than existence itself, is as comprehensive as any practised in the monastic orders, as Charles H. Hession discovered:

The economic system of belief comprises a cosmology, a metaphysics, a set of goals, an apologia, a vision (in the Schumpeterian sense). It is a definition of reality which mediates between man and man and between man and the unknown. ₃₄

Notably excluded from these beliefs, and thereby accentuating the dimension of faith, is any claim that they constitute a correspondence theory of truth, something which the positivism which lies at the heart of economics proclaims despite the fact that positivism itself comprises a set of beliefs; rather, they are seen as the logical consequence of mastering a set of beliefs within economic instruction and learning. ₃₅ Given the manifest inadequacies (anthropological, methodological, political, social, gender, and empirical) of the discipline of economics to describe anything remotely approaching the world of everyday life, contested as it might be, all this is as it should be. It is perhaps the only available reassurance born of the manifest necessity of simultaneously remaining in communion with a profession which is highly valued by the academy and by government, while acknowledging to one's self and one's colleagues that the basis for this esteem is profoundly similar to that extended by states to their established churches, namely, the gratitude of "guilded constituency" for being provided with a "justifying contrivance" of high practical value by an intelligentsia which is commonly believed to have "privileged access to the assumed mystery of money. ₃₆

This should not surprise for other reasons as well. The criterion of correspondence misses the point that economic belief, like religious dogma, serves immediate and crucial questions of identity, professionalism, and privilege that far outweigh, for priests as for economist, their contributions to understanding the world. It is the willingness to confess the requisite belief system (which Samuels also terms discourse on the basis of Galbraith's analyses) ₃₇ , and for this belief system to be sanctioned by the state, not its consequences and absurdities, that, in the case of economics, defines and socialises individuals as consumers, workers, and citizens in a particular system. ₃₈ Economists benefit from their confessional piety by deploying it strategically for "the exclusion of lines of thought that are hostile or unsettling to the discipline or, a related matter, to an influential economic or political community." ₃₉

It is a wise precaution and one totally understandable in that repository of Neo-Liberalism, the United States of America, especially in the context of its dominant religious beliefs. Neo-Classical Economics, and its currently elaborated ego, Neo--Liberalism, shares with (what Harold Bloom describes as) the American Religion such an identical demand for faith that it is not an exaggeration to say that, at the very least, they are mutually supporting; on an equally close examination, a more intimate relation is detectable wherein the determining strands of religious and economic belief are but extrusions from that fusion of beliefs known as American Gnosticism, a form of knowing:

. . . by and of an uncreated self, or self-within-the-self, and the knowledge leads to freedom, a dangerous and doom-eager freedom: from nature, time, history, community, other selves. ₄₀

At the heart of this religion lie the fear of dying, which by Bloom's account infuses all denominations in the USA, and a "mindlessness" that, among the fundamentalists, takes the form of a "vicious" anti-intellectualism, which, in combination produce an idea of the self as a "primordial Adam" (a Man before there were men and women). This is reinforced by the extraordinarily widely-held conviction by people in the USA that God loves them personally (in contra distinction to both Spinoza's remark that this was an unreasonable expectation, and to the Hebrew Bible which records that this favour was extended only to King David), and to wilder claims still which justify the term "fantasifaction." In sum, and in a phrase, stances which "engender parodies of religion." ₄₁ If a more practical demonstration of the fusion of these two belief systems into the life world of America, the instance to be cited is the realisation of American Gnosticism/Neo-Liberalism in the selfishness which has come to mark the national political economy.

Since the American Religion preceded Neo-Classical Economics, and since the discipline of economics, as persuasively argued by Dorothy Ross, had always to make its peace with the former (as expressed in that other great fusion, American Exceptionalism), Marx's observation in The Eighteenth Brumaire is that men learning a new language always begin by translating it back into the language they already know is most apposite. ₄₂ If, as is the case, the precedent was, or contained, to put the matter delicately, serious implausibilities, then the auguries for the credibility of the succeeding belief are correspondingly poor, even if their acceptance with, and by, faith is correspondingly assured. Of this operant principle Christopher Hitchens writes:

It's a curious thing in American life that the most abject nonsense will be excused if the utterer can claim the sanction of religion. A country which forbids an established religion by law is prey to any denomination. ₄₃

Much of the nonsense within capitalism is so sanctioned out of this accommodationist stance. Where Reformation Protestantism was once informed by a strict Calvinism which dwelt on "the `evil' inherent in people, on human powerlessness before the sovereignty of God, and on the difficulties in achieving salvation," and thus "armed the self against the seductions of secular culture [the pursuit of commercial success to the fore] and alerted it to the dangers of spiritual decline and weakness," its constancy was undermined by its own logic. ₄₄ That logic, based as it was on the rights of an individual conscience and the Calvinist mandate for urgent action in every aspect of people's lives gave rise to an unpredictable dialectic. While the former was, over time, politically and scientifically liberating (though isolating because highly individualistic), the latter, in the absence of sacramental justification, and the presence of predestination-induced anxiety, gave rise to a solitude which craved its own substitute -- the notion that the Reformation Christian "could find signs of his being among the elect if he could successfully and unceasingly apply himself to disciplined work and his worldly calling." ₄₅ Economically, in conjunction with other historical developments, it created a highly productive economy in which both economic desire and economic benefits were increasingly democratised. ₄₆ The self at the centre of this movement, thereby, became "the measure of things, self-defining and self-legislating." ₄₇

In the context of the Reformation and the "priesthood of all believers," the political-economic shift was essentially sacerdotal in character: the favoured circumstances were befitting of a priest, and indeed, in the excessive recognition of them it was possible to ascribe not only authority but a supernatural competence to those so chosen. Self was thus debased into selfishness, and, as Bloom puts it, "the believer's freedom from others into the bondage of others." ₄₈ Profit, accordingly, was blessed, while duty, self-denial, and the guilt of gratuitous consumption were banished within a perverse understanding of Calvinism's vocation to realise the Kingdom of God on earth. ₄₉ Ultimately, and again in context, the preposterous reigned as wisdom -- illustrated in Tarnas's reflection that, over time, "the Protestant doctrine of justification through the individual's faith in Christ seemed to place more emphasis on the individual's faith than on Christ -- on the personal relevance of ideas, as it were, rather than on their external validity." ₅₀ From William Graham Sumner's early twentieth century esteem for millionaires as not only socially beneficent but also a "product of natural selection," via the privileged status, in the 1980s, accorded the works of George Gilder and Arthur Laffer, to the similar status presently accorded the historically damaging doctrine of laissez faire in general, and the work of Charles A. Murray in particular, the record is one of affirmation. Though sometimes subject to wane, overall it reveals no shortage of instances in which economic doctrines beyond the serious regard of, in Galbraith's phrase, "anyone of sober mentality," are concomitantly mystified and acclaimed towards the end of giving acceptability, grace and justification, however transparent, to the position of the economically contented, and their "uninhibited accumulation of wealth." ₅₁

Terroristic Silence

What this understanding of economics-as-religion omits must now be included, namely, the inducement to religion which is provided by the pessimistic understanding inherent in the Reformation view of the relation between the "terrible righteousness of an angry God" and individual women and men in their fallen and corrupt state. In effect, economics and religion, and thus economics-as-religion, are but the elaborated consequences of the logic of the individualism of conscience and the terrible predicament imposed by that transformation: isolation -- from the previously all-enveloping Church, and before God; and alienation from other women and men. So acute are these conditions experienced that "terror" is the term he uses to describe them. ₅₂ Moreover, it is terror which is an inescapable condition of life as defined by the Reformation. Once the God of Abraham and Moses is accepted it follows; alternatively, if that understanding of God is not accepted, or if the concept of God itself is not accepted, then terror ensues through the advent of chaos. In economics, accordingly, to live without explanations invested with authority of phenomena central to life is to reproach humankind's curiosity and ego. ₅₃ One therefore either believes in a God because one is convinced that a God exists, or one believes in a God because a God is socio- strategically necessary.

The choice or disposition here is immaterial to the effect, which is both generally palliative and specifically analgesic in relation to the pathological nature of the human condition. Palliative because, in all common understandings of the word it is applicable: it gives superficial, or temporary relief; it serves to extenuate or excuse certain offences, and it alleviates the symptoms of the condition to which it is applied without curing it. Analgesic because, when administered with sufficient care and quantity, it removes the ability to feel pain. And pain there evidently is. As Luther was terrorised before the unrelenting gaze of God, individuals exposed to the unblinking scrutiny of the Market suffer from such post-partum anxiety that, according to Joan Robinson (who in tern was relying on Freud), their belief in it is to be understood as a return to the security once offers by the womb. ₅₄ In this Robinson is generally supported by both, inter alia, Adam Smith and Galbraith. It is the purpose of "philosophy," according to Smith, to:

" . . . introduce order into [the] chaos of jarring and discordant appearances, to allay the tumult of the imagination, and to restore it, when it surveys the great revolutions of the universe, to that tone of tranquillity and composure, which is most agreeable to itself , and most suitable to its nature. ₅₅

For Galbraith the introduction or restoration of agreeability then produces a psychic balm, an elision of any need to continually negotiate the present, and which, therefore, frames all (in)action: "Better the accepted patterns of life than the terrible costs of thought and choice." ₅₆

Even then, what remains unsaid is the ultimate sanction of the community of believers against dissenters. For Reformation Protestantism (as, indeed, for the Christianity which preceded it), to seriously doubt its core teachings, or to revise them without approval, and to give voice to that doubt or revision, was to invite denunciation, and in all likelihood, the charges of either apostasy, or heresy, or both. In that event the effective sentence imposed was to be silent among the community via the withdrawal of the not only the licence, but also the idiom in which the dissent or the injury might be heard, as captured here by Caputo:

It follows therefore that just as he who breaks with the bishop is no longer authorised to break the bread [of the Eucharist] so one who breaks with the bishop is no longer authorised to teach or interpret, to speak or to write. ₅₇

Just as Christianity, pre-, and post-Reformation, is littered with examples of the execution, or attempted execution, of this punishment, so too is the history of economics -- from the American Exceptionalist conformism of (American) marginalism, with its dismissal of scholars who espoused unacceptable politico-economic views, such as James Allen Smith, Edward Bemis, Richard Ely, Scott Nearing, Henry Wade Rogers, and E.A. Ross, to the inability of Thorstein Veblen to even obtain a position on the grounds of irreligion, to the Cold War persecution of academics hostile to capitalism, to even John Kenneth Galbraith's advice to aspiring economists not to follow his dissentient path if they wish to have a successful career in the discipline of economics -- the sanction of excommunication has been ever-present and imposed. ₅₈

Excommunication, however, results only from public practice, from the proclamation that certain acts are the empirical manifestation of the ideas with which they are integrated. Expressed in another way, to avoid the sanction, there is no requirement that the ideas change so long as public practice may be said to accord with the relevant dogma, thus achieving what Tarnas refers to as "the modern mind's sense of the interiority of religious reality." ₅₈ In this move dogma and freedom of conscience co-exist, but effectively, the latter is purchased at the cost not only of its silence on the former, but also its concession to deny that difference even exists. The religious and economic monologues which remain, therefore, are then permitted to worship God and the Market according to the same criterion -- namely that they are unchallenged in their status as a "cosmic constant." ₆₀

That being the case, the dominant theme of thought and action which emerges is one of passivity, a quite logical disposition if it is already accepted that the extant system is, cosmopolitically, the only one possible. At the same time this conclusion is also an inevitable return to the foundational belief which holds that, since both God and the Market are inscrutable, and the fate of any individual is already known to God, choice is an illusion -- in other words to a reacquaintance with the Reformation doctrine of predestination and the economic doctrine of Rational Expectations. In which case Reformation theology and Neo-Classical Economics alike are but dutiful commemorations in the spirit of M. Pangloss.

Paradoxes, Inversions, and Discontinuities

In the light of all such efforts to enforce a paradosis, it is seemingly absurd to discover phenomena in economic theory and practice that exhibit contradictions and conflicts which are contrary to the preconceived notions of what is reasonable or possible in the respective religious systems of belief. Yet this became the case in post-Reformation Protestantism with its reliance on "scripture alone," just as it is the case in the discipline of economics and its parsimonious, mathematicised core, most particularly in regard to their common obsession with mediation or, more explicitly, the imperative to dispense with all intercessions and supplements between individuals and the Origin in order to transcend the humanly compromised standpoint and adopt a divine one. ₆₁ What emerges is that neither the Reformation nor economics succeeded in turning fully away from that which they most reviled largely because such a turn was, in all likelihood, impossible, but in any case was impotent against the inescapability, the tyranny if you like, of their respective constructions of God.

Intending a "priesthood of all believers" who would know God through scripture alone and worship without graven images, Protestants very quickly elevated Luther to the role of oracle and some venerated cheap engravings of him, even in his lifetime; for his part, Luther's saw nothing amiss with an evangelism which employed "yellow-press language [which was] vivid beyond crudity in images." ₆₂ Economics conforms in all significant regards: in the devotion to their ideas, and based on a selective and reductionist reading of them at that, it has made apostles (pioneering missionaries authorised to lead reform) of its intellectual founders while requiring a priesthood to subsequently interpret them to the wider, vulgar audience. In both processes it is forgotten that any reliance on a text is coterminously a reliance on the limitations of a form which, by nature, is subject to "a certain uncertainty . . . about its authenticity, its sense," and that the purpose of the text in the first place is "to try to fill in or supplement a dangerous gap, to represent a Presence that has disappeared," and thus, that it stands "between the outside and the inside, between the founding act, the absolutely authorising Origin and everyone who depends on the Origin." ₆₃ To this end Christianity, no matter its confessional coloration, and economics, no matter its mathematical rigour, are irremediably mediated against their own first principles, and attempts to deny that this is so, are attempts to deny that the habits and spirit of the romanita which were once so reviled -- magisterium, auctoritas, potestas , priests, and the mystifications they wield and serve have, in the words of Nizzar Qabbani's banned poem, " . . . crept through our weaknesses like ants." ₆₄ But where the excesses of the Reformation noted above implied a knowledge of the benefits of images as propaganda among barely literate classes of the population rather than a capitulation to the Catholic counter-offensive, the moves in economics delimit its Reformation content: its paradoxes, as now detailed, establish a character both convivial with the medieval tradition of Christianity which saw monks as a "moral elite" committed to the strict practice of their understanding of its ideals, and equally at home in the tradition Catholicism's Counter-Reformation, replete with assiduous censorship, heroic missionary work, the Inquisition, mystical writings, and a super-elite intellectual caste in the form of the Jesuits ₆₅ Of this transition Caputo appropriately concludes:

This result confirms a warning that Derrida issues in Truth in Painting to beware of those who promise to give us something unmediated, who would dispense with screens and mediations in order to put us in direct contact with the Origin, for we will later on find ourselves visited with the most massive mediations, with bishops and long robes and police all over the place. ₆₆

If ecclesiolatry is a sufficient condition by which we would know that Derrida's forebodings have been realised, then the evidence is to hand in economics. Not only is an excessive reverence for its "learned and priestly circle" practised, but such veneration is virtually demanded in a manner which recalls Olsen's description of the attempts by reformers in the post-Gregorian period to subject the church to the disciplines of the coenobitic life by "monasticising" its history and practices. ₆₇ Of this advent and its advocacy there is probably no better example than in the considerable writings of Paul Krugman.

Like John Kenneth Galbraith, Krugman supports the general proposition that the educational and scientific estate are a civilising force in the world, but where the latter departs from the former is in his intense differentiation between professionally authorised economists, with whom he proudly identifies, and invading commentators on economics who are, for him, irretrievably other. To read Krugman is to be made aware at every turn that, in the great debates he is more conscious of this difference than he is of their shared identity with other citizens, intellectuals, or (say) political economists. Consequently he is unequivocal about the need to think and scrutinise economics from a single totalising position. ₆₈

Krugman's concern is that of the eleventh-century pope, Gregory VII, a reformer, certainly, but who was concerned not so much to innovate , but rather to renew norms and laws which had fallen into desuetude. ₆₉ Their particular and common concern is with the interdiction of the appointment of bishops by the king, -- for which read the emergence of non-economists as significant contributors to the national discourse on economics, the similar prominence accorded to economists who are variously derided as "misguided" or guilty of "careless (or "sloppy" math[ematics]," and President Clinton's decision to listen to, and even appoint, some of them as advisers. ₇₀ Krugman's response accords more with Pius IV, Innocent III, and Ignatius Loyola (though it also owes something to the Gregory XVI); specifically, he seeks nothing less than a "conversion offensive" which would consciously reorganise the discourse of economics from top to bottom in order that it might constitute a common culture and profess a common faith, remarkably akin to the transformations wrought in the Catholic Church throughout the nineteenth century. ₇₁ In both cases, of course, the return is not so much to pre-existing traditions so much as to a "decor" which conceals a problematic reality -- for the Church a distorted Middle Age Christianity; for Krugman, to the insights of Hume and Ricardo (without any mention of the epistemological reservations of the former which would undermine Krugman's, and neo-classical discipline's scientific pretensions). ₇₂

The prescriptions, for Krugman in this time of crisis, as it was for Paul III in the face of the Reformation, though apparently similar, are profoundly dissimilar. Sixteenth-century militant Catholicism produced the Jesuits who, in time became "the most celebrated teachers on the Continent" -- a justly deserved plaudit based on their immersion in an education comprising:

. . . not only teaching of the Catholic faith and theology, but also the full humanistic programme from the Renaissance and classical era -- Latin and Greek letters, rhetoric, logic and metaphysics, ethics, science and mathematics, music, even the gentlemanly arts of acting and fencing -- all in the service of developing a scholarly "soldier of Christ:" a morally disciplined, liberally educated, critically intelligent Christian man capable of outwitting the Protestant heretics and furthering the great Western tradition of Catholic learning. ₇₃

By any criteria, the comparison with Loyola's Jesuits is embarrassing, because Krugman's imagination is so impoverished that his vision of reform is, like numerous pontiffs before him, no more than a backward glance which Paul III would have found contemptible. But perhaps that misses the point, which is that his intentions, at least, would have been blessed by Paul III.

To match the economic "heretics" of the Clinton era -- inter alia, James Fallows, Jeffrey Garten, Robert Kuttner, Edward Luttwak, Ira Magaziner and Mark Patinkin, Clyde Prestowitz, Robert Reich, Lester Thurow, the World Economic Forum, and even Apple Computer's John Sculley and the best-selling fiction writer, Michael Crichton -- to counter the damage inflicted on the otherwise attentive public of the United States of America by their, and like-minded, contributions published in The American Prospect and The Atlantic, and/or broadcast on McNeil-Lehrer, and ultimately, to counter the "extremely primitive" level of ensuing public discussion, Krugman's response is extraordinary. He proposes to "vaccinate" undergraduates via a "basic training [and] solid grounding in the principles of international trade" in order that they will "respond intelligently" to the what he describes as pervasive international economic nonsense. ₇₄ As he develops his proposal it is clear that he is arguing for the ordination of a putative social, and no doubt political, elite, in the spirit of the enabling legislation for the Council of Economic Advisers (who, it is specified, must be professional economists) by lamenting the damaging extension of the advisory circle on economics to other discourses.

In view of the high percentage of college graduates among the citizens in the United States, this proposal can be seen as Reformative because, without doubt, its objective is "the priesthood of all believers" -- believers who have been cultivated in, and fortified by, the sacramental experience of selective exposure to Hume and Ricardo prior to their professional deployment. Not for them an education (from educere, to lead, or draw, out), but the instruction, (from instruere, to build in), of the seminary. And here Krugman is adrift on a sea of professional conceit because he clearly believes that the power, or capacity, to produce certain desired effects is governed by the theological formula ex opere operantis -- "by the efficiency of the celebrant" when, more correctly, efficacy proceeds from ex opere operato -- "by the efficiency of the ceremony itself." Thus disclosed is more than a fixation with the need to return economics to a position of eminence; it is, more significantly, the guise taken by Counter-Reformational reform within the resubordination of the body of the Church to its traditional rule and teachings.

If, as is argued earlier, we should understand the Market as the god-equivalent in economics, then Krugman's representation is even more appropriately situated this way. While there is no doubt that all lay people can orient, or convert, themselves to the market, be subject to its inscrutable ways, and even offer penance for derogations from it, they cannot escape the fact that they are, for all their experience, uninstructed and formally unlearned. By default they are not the elect; they lack that critical "experience of the God" which is provided by highly pressurised, and disciplined training, culminating in a searching examination upon, and the official certification of, a spiritual and intellectual conversion which is known as the metanoia.

It is this view of economists as confreres in a contemplative order which forces a brief return to John Kenneth Galbraith's "assumed mysteries" in economics. Quite apart from their installation in society at a superior and demarcated position on the basis of their own criteria, what is being effected is the contemplation of the Market in such a way that mystification is ensured, and accepted in a spirit of appropriate humility, a not difficult achievement given that knowledge of the Market -- sufficient to enable planning, for example -- is assumed to be unavailable a priori. In combination what both effect is an "exorcising and masking of power," by deferring to the realm of the ultimately unknowable those questions (unemployment and vast disparities in wealth for example) which most demand a human answer, and in the process transforming them into questions of faith rather than political questions. Thus John Ralston Saul writes of the way in which managerial decisions which brutalise their victims while enriching shareholders are sanctified:

Efficiency is . . . one to watch for. This minor shop floor characteristic has been promoted to near membership in the Holy Trinity. Notice that it is efficiency we always hear about and not effectiveness. Effectiveness is about content and policy delivery. Efficiency is just an abstract and primarily negative term. ₇₅

It would perhaps be difficult to find a more exemplary case in the Counter-Reformative project of neo-liberalism than this, in which the necessary "passivity before the inevitable" is rendered possible through the proselytising efforts of economists, and correspondingly sought by their acolytes, through an appeal to such a mercenary concept that, for one of the contemporary period's more accessible and philosophically attuned critics, it bears comparison to what is arguably Christianity's most impenetrable doctrine.

But the comparison is even more invidious in the light of the overall processes in which economics is now clearly engaged. As time passes these transport it further and further into the romanita . Again, the most notable of these are best understood in contra-distinction to the Reformation. Recall, in Tarnas's formulation, the Reformation sought to reclaim "the unalterable word of God in the Bible" and thereby fostered "a new stress on the need to discover unbiased objective truth, apart from the prejudices and distortions of tradition." Crucially, this gave rise to "the growth of a scientific mentality" which was undeterred from reappraising all claims and all wisdom, even those which had given rise to its advent in the first place. Moreover, in the contemporary dialectic between the literal meaning of Scripture and the new rationality, an "impossible tension' was created as the latter increasingly contradicted the former, leading speedily to a dichotomy between faith and reason. Reconciliation was possible only by consigning faith and its relevance to the individual mind, while science was installed as the intellectually superior, and practically more significant account of the external, physical world. ₇₆ Thus, that "fundamental element in the genesis of the Reformation" which was marked by a "spirit of rebellious, self-determining individualism, and . . . the growing impulse for intellectual and spiritual independence," and which eventually became so potent that it could challenge the Roman Catholic Church, also became so potent that it gave rise to a triumphant secularism, "disenchanting the world of immanent divinity" on the way, and inverting the intentions of its founders. ₇₇

Consider now the economic reformation. It was born of the dialectical overthrow of political economy by Newtonian science, an imitative project based on the apparent exemplar of late nineteenth century physics (which itself was held to be luminous through its foundation in the formal logics of mathematics). When in time, and especially now, economics' confrontation with the same nemesis of the Reformation -- positivist science -- demonstrates its inferiority, the disciplinary response follows the latter's precedent, at least in the style of its response: it defines as irrelevant those influences (initial conditions, culture, history, and society) which contribute most to its inadequacies; begs the existence of that which is most contested (virtually all of its free-market assumptions in general and the "as if" claim in particular); either proscribes science if it is embarrassing to its self-identity (as in the injunction to avoid the discussion of mathematics, methodology, and philosophy) or, persists in practising it in a debauched, parodying way (use of convenient data sets); or, failing all else, makes explicit what the previous recourses imply by appealing directly to faith (as did George Gilder in proposing that regressive taxation was necessary for the rich, just as poverty was a necessary inducement for the poor to succeed).

In sum, the fate of economic science is that of post-Reformation religious belief: to the extent that it entails the type of rigour associated with its exemplar, Newtonian physics, it is exiled from secular life and relegated to the status of a conscience belief which describes a desirable but unachievable state of affairs, a resident of greater or lesser prominence in the mind only. Faith, on the other hand, which suffered this fate at the hands of the post-Reformation scientific revolution, is the reserved prerogative of economics and, according to its own dispensation, that which distinguishes and gives precedence to its adherents. Both the religious and the economic Reformation, therefore, are to be seen as movements which adopted a defining confession which, when dialectically opposed to the consequences directly proceeding from that confession, not only de-essentialised that confession, but reassumed the confessional privileges which were the first cause of their grievance. Effectively, they engaged in an Orwellian inversion. For the Reformation this involved the double blasphemy of substituting, first, the individual for Christ, and second, science for faith; religion became secular. In economics it took the more straightforward form of a stance which, while demanding faith, denied that it was denying science; economics became religiose. And in a most surprising manner, one which recalls both the pre-Reformation selling of indulgences by the Dominican friar, Johann Tetzel, on the instructions of the Medici pope, Leo X, to raise money for the building of St. Peter's Basilica, and the anti-intellectualism of contemporary Catholicism and Protestantism which found common cause in their condemnation of Copernicus's astronomy for impiety. ₇₈

If any processes imply the use of the term "discontinuities," then these must be seen among them. Equally, they must be seen as broadly consistent with a tradition of discontinuity in Christianity and Economics which results from their confrontation with unforseeable ideas, persistent claims of everyday life, and, most of all, with details they refuse to recognise in the pursuit of a "single, assured, and reassuring style." ₇₉ More particularly, they are to be seen as arising from the claim to embrace both the Origin of the existence they seek to describe, and the relation to that Origin of everyone who depends on it, within an account ostensibly authorised by the Origin, and thus, within a fixed text -- one within such a firm interpretive context" that the river of interpretations will always flow within fixed borders." ₈₀ Recall for a moment, for Christianity, this guarantee against plurivocity is found in the post-Easter appearance of Jesus to the disciples on the road to Emmaus, the defining occasion on which he interpreted the Scriptures with great clarity for them, performed the sacrament of the Eucharist and, of insurmountable significance, demonstrated that he had indeed risen from the dead. Caputo describes the overall meaning of the encounter for the "fixed border" tradition of Christianity:

. . . this story is a text about the text [the New Testament]. It is a kind of self-instruction that the text leaves behind, a kind of auto-hermeneutics inscribed in the text, something like the stage instructions that a playwright inscribes in his text, by means of which the text itself instructs us about how it is to be read. The reading must always be entrusted to the hands of the one whose hands break the bread, which is pre-eminently the hands of the bishop, or the hands of the ones whom the bishop consecrates. ₈₁

Recall too, that, imitatively, Economics affirms itself through a single authorised account of the Market-as-Origin, the installation of Rational-Economic-Man-as-Imitation-of-Christ, and the formal, transformative logic of Mathematics-as-Eucharist and prophylactic against error. The sacramental symmetry is complete. Through the transubstantiative / consubstantiative ritual of religion, bread and wine are converted into the body and blood of Christ; acting in accordance with the tenets of the Market-as-Origin, Economics works the miracle of common man's transformation into Rational Economic Man and celebrates the exemplary Presence.

Recall, also, that which is lost unless the detail of a close reading is given the attention it deserves, namely that these theological miracles were never authorised and never intended to effect the consequences they did. Caputo describes the foremost among these:

The idea behind Jesus's ministry, the exegetes think, was not Jesus but the father, abba . . . He came to give glory to the father who was greater than him. The followers of Jesus however ignored what Jesus had in mind; they did not follow what Jesus taught but began instead to teach Jesus himself, and him crucified. Had the followers of Jesus followed Jesus, there would be no Christianity because Christianity was not Jesus's idea, not what Jesus taught, and it is almost certainly something that, had Jesus lived, we can well imagine he would have opposed. The birth of Christianity depended on the death of its author, not because he died for our sins and in order to establish his church, but because had he lived he would have opposed the idea of such a church. ₈₂

Correspondingly, had the followers of one of the metaphorical fathers of Modernity, Rene Descartes, whose quest for certainty through formal logic subsumes Economics, and one of that discipline's canonical thinkers, Leon Walrus, taken them seriously, it does not over-state the case to say that much of what was done in their names would not have been done; that the institutionalisation of their misappropriated ideas followed from the wilfulness of their followers; and that, accordingly, their projects were hi-jacked. Thus, what might have been understood in the first instance was that, far from being the "unfolding of a pure esprit untouched by the historical events of his time," Descartes philosophical development was his attempt to escape the seemingly interminable political and theological chaos of the Thirty Years War by providing the peoples of Europe with a hope of reasoning their way out of it. ₈₃ His project to place human knowledge on "foundations" that are "clear, distinct, and certain," necessarily had an appeal and an urgency, but, of greater significance, it needed to be understood as an historical response to an historical issue, not, as posterity has regarded it, a divinely ordained prescription for the retreat from the oral to the written, the particular to the universal, the local to the general, and from the timely to the timeless. ₈₄

Hence we can acquire a perspective on Walrus, whom Heilbroner and Milberg laud as "the commanding figure" of the marginalist movement in neo-classical economics. He applied himself to the purpose celebrated by those who have misread Descartes -- highly disengaged, abstract science -- other, and greater (in his view), than that to which his practical political concerns were bent. It is, therefore, significant to record that Walrus, was "quite indifferent -- even hostile -- to the practical application of general equilibrium analysis to political life, despite his own lifelong interest in questions of agrarian socialism." ₈₅ Moreover, in his preoccupation with Descartes' quest and exaggerated legacy of certainty as defined in, and through, mathematics, there is that inattention to Caputo's "devilish details," especially by his disciples -- in the form of mathematics' own historicity, and, after Godel, infinite crises of certainty -- which might have cautioned against their subsequent turn to romanita . ₈₆ They might even have noted, as has Napoleoni, the counter-theological content of the Walrusian model of the market economy -- which can be manipulated so as to obviate the need for a market in the first place, and so suggests that knowledge sufficient to allow economic planning is possible. ₈₇

Writ large, the attention to detail would have established profound absence common to pre-Reformation Christianity, Reformation Protestantism, Counter-Reformation Catholicism, and Economics: no umbilical connection to the Origin in whose name they proclaim truth, despite rejection, reformation, and renewal. The inescapable fact is that the Origin, to the extent it ever was an Origin, has absconded, leaving Christians and Economists with their irrational terror of the open spaces. Christians, we are assured, know their God through a multi-authored, multi-translated account of his Word, but to take this seriously is to sooner or later confront the fact that a gap, or "a bit of an abyss" inevitably exists between Him and even his first interlocutor.

Christians are always already late-comers, always the latter-day disciples, always arriving too late for the origin, after a crowd (ecclesia) has already gathered. [They] are the ecclesia of those who come too late for the Origin and too early for the parousia. ₈₈

Economics know this agoraphobia well, or rather, through its numerous and demonstrable failures it is well acquainted with the consequences of re-forming itself into economics from political economy according to the rationalist dream of purity in human reasoning. It alighted upon certainty through the veneration of physics, and linear Newtonian science in general, almost at the precise moment that they were being overthrown in favour of uncertainty, a quantum reality, and the acceptance of science as a mediation, or in a biblical sense, as science was passing from its old, to its new, Testament. Within Caputo's description, it merely joined the growing assembly convoked by the scientific revolution over the previous two-and-one-half centuries. And within the example bequeathed by Descartes, it moved away from greater or lesser intellectual scepticism and the tolerance of ambiguity, and towards not just certainty, but that consummation of the demand for certainty which Toulmin defines as the "belief in belief itself." ₈₉ All of which might be unremarkable if Economics had not, and did not, justify its juridical solutions to every human dilemma by an appeal to a Presence which has manifestly withdrawn and was, and remains, insufficiently understood even by its exegetes.

Understanding the religious path that Economics has followed, is to understand that Economics in its early neo-classical stage of development, like the Reformation, was given to a condition which some might describe as the "unreturned glance," whereby the faith in the efficacy of the return overwhelmed the self-awareness which made the return necessary in the first instance. Equally and less forgivingly, this is a condition of "deliberate blindness," and it is in this sense that we should understand late twentieth-century Economics. Like the Counter-Reformation, it is juridically inhuman, politically oppressive and reactionary, and scandalously anti-intellectual. Both became alienated from concerns which were essentially social and political in their respective assertions of certainty. In this process their belief systems were made obligatory if communion with other members of the faithful was to be maintained; at the same time they effectively incarcerated, or at least, consensually isolated these systems to the point where, accustomed to flattery in the guise of obligation, both scorned critical knowledge of themselves. Or, where that knowledge was difficult to evade because it came from on high and within, as in Leamer's caustic observations on the contradictions in the discipline, the response is that encapsulated by Camus in his reflection on the grotesque habits of modern times: "They admit sin and refuse grace."

But here we are talking of people, an intellectual movement, who believe that they experience the metanoia; not for them intellectual existence in a "twilight space, of flickering images, a space in which the withdrawal leaves its trace behind, like a fissure in a surface left behind by something, je ne sais quois, which has passed through it and disappeared." ₉₀ This is, after all, a regime enthralled by magisterium, auctoritas, potestas . For all that, the admission of sin and the refusal of grace suggest a more appropriate conclusion, one that resonates with both the debilitated Church of the pre-Reformation and the undisguised exploitation of the papacy by the Medicis: the substitution of metanoia. by agnosia (the failure to recognise). ₉₁ Given that Economics effected a reformation (Honee's "double regularity of distortion and discovery"); given also that it was able to consciously and profoundly proclaim itself as separate from its predecessor's heritage, concerns and practices, the extant impetus and condition may indeed be spiritual, but it is essentially one characterised by the ability to see objects, including the self, yet not to identify them. Neuroscientifically, this results from damage to the visual cortex; intellectually, in the case of Economics, it is an acquired, which is to say, learned, collapse of the higher integrative processes for complex form recognition.

Notes:

Note 1: Eugene Honee, "The relation of old and new and the phenomenon of reformation," in J.B.M. Wissink (ed.), (Dis)Continuity and (De)Construction: Reflections on the Meaning of the Past in Crisis Situations (Kampen, The Netherlands: Pharos, 1995), pp. 30 & 45 (hereafter cited as Honee, "The relation of old and new and the phenomenon of reformation"). Back.

Note 2: For this acerbic and neat distinction I am grateful to J.S. McClelland, A History of Western Political Thought (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 174. Back.

Note 3: Morris West, Lazurus (Port Melbourne, Vic.: William Heinemann Australia, 1990), pp. 67, 9, & 105, respectively (hereafter cited as West, Lazarus). Back.

Note 4: Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas That Have Shaped Our World View (New York: Ballantine, 1991), pp. 233-243 (hereafter cited as Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind). Back.

Note 5: Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago; Chicago University Press, 1990), p. 79 (hereafter cited as Toulmin, Cosmopolis). Back.

Note 6: John Ralston Saul, The Unconscious Civilization (Ringwood, Vic.; Penguin, 1997), p. 88 (hereafter cited as Saul, The Unconscious Civilization). Back.

Note 7: Edward E. Leamer, "Specification Searches: Ad hoc Inferences with Non- experimental Data" (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1978), p. vi, as cited in Tony Lawson, Economics and Reality (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 6-7, (hereafter cited as Leamer, "Specification Searches: Ad hoc Inferences with Non-experimental Data"). Back.

Note 8: Edward E. Leamer, "Let's Take the Con Out of Econometrics," American Economic Review 73 (March 1983): 36, as cited in Deborah A. Redman, Economics and the Philosophy of Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 120-121. Back.

Note 9: Leamer, "Specification Searches: Ad hoc Inferences with Non-experimental Data") p. vi. Back.

Note 10: John D. Caputo, "Bedeviling the tradition: on deconstruction and catholicism," in J.B.M. Wissink (ed.), (Dis)Continuity and (De)Construction: Reflections on the Meaning of the Past in Crisis Situations (Kampen, The Netherlands: Pharos, 1995), pp. 15-18 (hereafter cited as Caputo, "Bedeviling the tradition"). Back.

Note 11: ibid, p. 18. Back.

Note 12: The present surely needs no explanation of this claim; neither, probably does its predecessor, but just in case it does, the reference is to the woodcut and movable type. For a brief account, see: Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Millennium: A History of Our Last Thousand Years (*London: Black Swan, 1996), pp. 276-277 (hereafter cited as Fernandez-Armesto, Millennium). Back.

Note 13: For a brief account of the meanings of reformation in the above context see Honee, "The relation of old and new and the phenomenon of reformation," pp. 39-40. Back.

Note 14: John Kenneth Galbraith, A Short History of Financial Euphoria (New York: Viking, 1990), p. 17 (hereafter cited as Galbraith, A Short History of Financial Euphoria). Back.

Note 15: ibid, p. 16. Back.

Note 16: References to the reformation in this section are from Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind, p. 237-238. Back.

Note 17: ibid, p. 234. Back.

Note 18: Caputo, "Bedeviling the tradition," pp. 15-16. Back.

Note 19: Peter Preston, "Modes of Economic-Theoretical Engagement," in Roy Dilley (ed.), Contesting Markets: Analyses of Ideology, Discourse and Practice (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992), hereafter cited as Preston, "Modes of Economic-Theoretical Engagement." Back.

Note 20: ibid, p. 60, and S. Pollard, The Idea of Progress (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), p. 138-139, as cited, ibid, p. 58. Back.

Note 21: ibid, pp. 57-58. Back.

Note 22: ibid, pp. 65-66. Back.

Note 23: Galbraith, A Short History of Financial Euphoria, pp. 23-24. Back.

Note 24: Preston, "Modes of Economic-Theoretical Engagement, pp. 66-67." Back.

Note 25: Max Weber, on the Protestant ethic, as cited in Alan Wolfe, "The Moral Meanings of Work," in The American Prospect, September-October 1997, p. 85 (hereafter cited as Wolfe, "The Moral Meanings of Work"). Back.

Note 26: Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind, p. 239. Back.

Note 27: Rom: 12.2., as cited in Honee, "The relation of old and new and the phenomenon of reformation," p. 37. Back.

Note 28: ibid, pp. 36-41. Back.

Note 29: ibid, p. 40. Back.

Note 30: ibid, pp. 37-39. Back.

Note 31: Michael McKinley, "Globalisation as War: Equivalence and Convergence in the Theory and Practice of Neoliberalism," paper presented to the 38th Annual Convention of the International Studies Association, Toronto, Canada, 21 March 1997. Back.

Note 32: John Kenneth Galbraith, American Capitalism, rev.ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956), p. 17, as cited in Warren J. Samuels, "Galbraith on Economics as a System of Professional Belief," in his (Samuels')Essays in the History of Heterodox Political Economy (New York: New York University Press, 1992), p. 294 (hereafter cited as Samuels, Essays in the History of Heterodox Political Economy ). Back.

Note 33: John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958), p. 7, (hereafter cited as Galbraith, The Affluent Society) as cited in Samuels, Essays in the History of Heterodox Political Economy , p. 295. Back.

Note 34: Charles H. Hession, John Kenneth Galbraith and His Critics (New York: Mentor, 1972), p. 195, as cited in Samuels, Essays in the History of Heterodox Political Economy , p. 295. Back.

Note 35: ibid, p. 294. Back.

Note 36: John Kenneth Galbraith, The Culture of Contentment (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1992), pp. 80, 104, and 88-89, resp. (hereafter cited as Galbraith, The Culture of Contentment ). Back.

Note 37: Samuels, Essays in the History of Heterodox Political Economy , pp. 6 & 350. Back.

Note 38: John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967), p. 370, as cited in Samuels, Essays in the History of Heterodox Political Economy , p. 302. Back.

Note 39: John Kenneth Galbraith, Economics, Peace and Laughter (New York: New American Library, 1972), p. 56, as cited in Samuels, Essays in the History of Heterodox Political Economy , p. 295. Back.

Note 40: Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian-Nation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992 (hereafter cited as Bloom, The American Religion), p. 49. Back.

Note 41: ibid, pp. 15, 17, and 257-258. Back.

Note 42: Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), hereafter cited as Ross, The Origins of American Social Science. Back.

Note 43: Christopher Hitchens, "Standing Tall,' in Prepared for the Worst (London: Hogarth; 1990), p. 277. Back.

Note 44: William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Pantheon, 1993), p. 195 hereafter cited as Leach, Land of Desire). Back.

Note 45: Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind, pp. 245-246. Back.

Note 46: Leach, Land of Desire, pp. 3-12. Back.

Note 47: Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind, p. 243. Back.

Note 48: Bloom, The American Religion, p. 258. Back.

Note 49: Leach, Land of Desire, pp. 229-229 in conjunction with Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind, p. 245. Back.

Note 50: Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind, p. 243. Back.

Note 51: Galbraith, The Culture of Contentment , pp. 80-108. Back.

Note 52: Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind, p. 245. Back.

Note 52: Back.

Note 53: Galbraith, The Affluent Society, as cited in Samuels, Essays in the History of Heterodox Political Economy , p. 295. Back.

Note 54: Joan Robinson, Economic Philosophy (London: C.A. Watts, 1962), as cited in Preston, "Modes of Economic-Theoretical Engagement," p. 65. Back.

Note 55: Adam Smith, "History of Astronomy," in Essays on Philosophical Subjects (and Miscellaneous Pieces), ed. W.P.D. Wightman; part of The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), pp. 45-46, as cited in Robert Heilbroner and William Milberg, The Crisis of Vision in Modern Economic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 16 (hereafter cited as Heilbroner and Milberg, The Crisis of Vision in Modern Economic Thought) Back.

Note 56: John Kenneth Galbraith, Economics and the Public Purpose (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973), p. 226, as cited in Samuels, Essays in the History of Heterodox Political Economy , p. 296. Back.

Note 57: Caputo, "Bedeviling the tradition," p. 18. Back.

Note 58: See David Colander and A.W. Coates (eds.), The Spread of Economic Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 34; Michael Parenti, Against Empire (San Francisco: City Lights, 1995), pp. 175-196; and Ross, The Origins of American Social Science, pp. 172-218. Back.

Note 59: Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind, p. 243. Back.

Note 60: Heilbroner and Milberg, The Crisis of Vision in Modern Economic Thought., p. 83. Back.

Note 61: Caputo, "Bedeviling the tradition," p. 16. Back.

Note 62: Fernandez-Armesto, Millennium, p. 276. Back.

Note 63: Caputo, "Bedeviling the tradition," p. 17. Back.

Note 64: Nizzar Qabbani, "Footnotes to the Book of the Setback" (1967). The full text is available in Michael Rosen and David Widgery (eds.), The Chatto Book of Dissent (London: Chatto and Windus, 1994), pp. 101-105. Back.

Note 65: For such an explanation regarding the Reformation, see Fernandez-Armesto, Millennium, p. 276; for the account on the Counter-Reformation refer to Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind, pp. 247-247. Back.

Note 66: Jacques Derrida, La verite en peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1978), pp. 372-373, as referred to in Caputo, "Bedeviling the tradition," p. 18. Back.

Note 67: G. Olsen, "The idea of the Ecclesia Primitiva in the writings of the twelfth-century Canonists," Traditio 25(1960): 61-86, hier 67, as cited in Honee, "The relation of old and new and the phenomenon of reformation," p. 44. Back.

Note 68: Here, I am relying heavily on an Essay which originally appeared in the American Economic Review (May 1993): 23-26, but appears as Chapter 8 ("What Do Undergrads Need to Know About Trade?") in Paul Krugman, Pop Internationalism (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1996), pp. 117-125 (hereafter cited as Krugman, Pop Internationalism). Back.

Note 69: Honee, "The relation of old and new and the phenomenon of reformation," p. 43. Back.

Note 70: Krugman, Pop Internationalism, pp. 3-33; 69-84; and 129-154. Back.

Note 71: Honee, "The relation of old and new and the phenomenon of reformation," p. 45, and Krugman, Pop Internationalism, pp. 117-125. Back.

Note 72: ibid, pp. 45 and 124-125, resp. Back.

Note 73: Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind, pp. 246-247. Back.

Note 74: Krugman, Pop Internationalism, pp. 3-33; 69-84; and 117-125. Back.

Note 75: Saul, The Unconscious Civilization, pp. 126-127. Back.

Note 76: Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind, pp. 242-243. Back.

Note 77: ibid, pp. 234 and 241-243. Back.

Note 78: ibid, pp. 252-253. Back.

Note 79: Caputo, "Bedeviling the tradition," p. 14. Back.

Note 80: ibid, pp. 15-18. Back.

Note 81: ibid, pp. 17-18. Back.

Note 82: ibid, pp. 28-29. Back.

Note 83: Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 70-71 (hereafter cited as Toulmin, Cosmopolis). Back.

Note 84: ibid, pp. 30-35, and 70-71. Back.

Note 85: Heilbroner and Milberg, The Crisis of Vision in Modern Economic Thought, p. 2. Back.

Note 86: Morris Kline, Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 4-5; 310; 313; 307-327, and 348. Back.

Note 87: C. Napoleoni, Economic Thought in the Twentieth Century (London: Martin Robertson, 1972), as cited in Preston, "Modes of Economic-Theoretical Engagement," p. 65. Back.

Note 88: Caputo, "Bedeviling the tradition," p. 21 and pp. 21-23. Back.

Note 89: Toulmin, Cosmopolis, p. 55. Back.

Note 90: Caputo, "Bedeviling the tradition," p. 21 and p. 23. Back.

Note 91: See Susan Greenfield, The Human Brain: A Guided Tour (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1997), pp. 49-50. Back.