Introduction

Introduces the community of radical economics. Sets out the book’s goals of showing how economics became what it is today: a divided discipline, and how radicals were key protagonists in this change. It contends that a set of blinders have prevented us from seeing radical economics as a deserving subject in the history of social science. The history of economics as a genre has for nearly a century been drawn to stories about schools of doctrine, and radical economics developed along a different pattern, it was a movement of intellectuals. At the same time, radicals also do not fit a master narrative of economics as a science of institutional design and of an all-purpose expert. That narrative misses a counter trend of economists who have challenged technocracy and its academic missionaries and worked instead for an economic democracy that empowers those who have been the victims of prevailing economic rationality.