Ideology, scientism and neutrality: a critical reconsideration of economics from a Marxian-Gramscian perspective

Abstract

The construction of knowledge within the mainstream or orthodox economy considers that the logical abstraction of assumptions, the formalization of reasoning and the enunciation of testable hypotheses are based on the effectiveness of their predictions as a guarantee of research neutrality and scientific rigor. However, like any other methodological proposal on the construction of scientific knowledge, it is far from neutral. From the concept of ideology in Karl Marx and Antonio Gramsci it is possible to understand that the methodology adopted in economic science is the result of a historical process whose objective was to give shape to a theory capable of establishing a new economic common sense that would legitimize the needs of the dominant historical block. Its origin can be traced from the emergence of the marginalist revolution in the late nineteenth century, through the mathematization of the discipline in the second postwar period