As the dominant discourse would have it, the economic world is a pure and perfect
order, implacably unrolling the logic of its predictable consequences, and prompt to
repress all violations by the sanctions that it inflicts, either automatically or -
more unusually - through the intermediary of its armed extensions, the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
(OECD) and the policies they impose: reducing labour costs, reducing public
expenditures and making work more flexible. Is the dominant discourse right? What if,
in reality, this economic order were no more than the implementation of a utopia - the
utopia of neoliberalism - thus converted into a political problem? One that, with the
aid of the economic theory that it proclaims, succeeds in conceiving of itself as the
scientific description of reality?
This tutelary theory is a pure mathematical fiction. From the start it has been founded
on a formidable abstraction. For, in the name of a narrow and strict conception of
rationality as individual rationality, it brackets the economic and social conditions
of rational orientations and the economic and social structures that are the condition of their
To give the measure of this omission, it is enough to think just of the educational
system. Education is never taken account of as such at a time when it plays a
determining role in the production of goods and services as in the production of the
producers themselves. From this sort of original sin, inscribed in the Walrasian myth
(1) of "pure theory", flow all of the deficiencies and faults of the discipline of