 Is economics dangerous for democracy?Jacques Sapir () Cahiers d’économie politique / Papers in Political Economy, 2004, issue 47, 111-126 Abstract: The very place of political values in economic thinking is becoming again an important topic. Since Myrdal's seminal book it has been more or less forgotten by mainstream practitioners. Still the increasingly common reference to institutions and rules in mainstream or neo-mainstream publications points to the opening of a new round of an old debate. If mainstream economists are by now ready to use words like "democracy", "social capital" and are even ready to investigate possible relations between religious believes and economic growth, they don't seem ready to break with the anti-political tradition which has been part of economic thought since the XVIIIth century. The very attempt to build economics as a sister science to Physics is more than probably strengthening and anti-democracy bias in economic thinking. But for a decisive break with this tradition, not only will economics be grounded on false and unsafe methodological base for analytical and normative works, but their prescriptive dimension could be utterly dangerous. JEL-codes: K42 P26 (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpo:journl:y:2004:i:47:p:111-126 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from Access Statistics for this article Cahiers d’économie politique / Papers in Political Economy is currently edited by Claire Pignol More articles in Cahiers d’économie politique / Papers in Political Economy from L'Harmattan |
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