Conclusion

The story of radical economics teaches us several lessons. One lesson is that protest works. By mobilizing their discontent peers into a movement within their discipline, radicals were able to enact change at a scale that has had no recent equivalent. Since then, economics has never again recovered the semblance of compliant consensus, it has been a divided discipline. If the changes to the economics discipline did not go further this was not out of defeat but of disinterest, disengagement, and alienation. Radicals were turning away from their confinement in classrooms and congress hotels. They embraced political tests as fundamental to their practice as researchers. Rather than a contaminant to knowledge, their participation and solidarity with mass movements helped radicals to innovate in their choice of topics and research strategies. Finally, radicals’ attitude toward the future was never one of a defined telos. Never utopians, they believed that change was possible, necessary, and at times imminent. This urged them to be prepared to participate in crisis times, through critique of the present and through proposals for reform or revolution grounded in that present.