I wrote an article for Liberty Fund on the hostility to economics (not to a particular school of economics, but economics itself) which was led by Edmund Burke, and taken up later by the proponents of slavery. Excerpt:
Burke’s Reflections went beyond condemning the French Revolution’s violence. Its primary focus was on what Burke saw as the Revolution’s philosophical essence: the effort to apply “light and reason” to questions of political philosophy. This, he warned, would result in the overthrow of traditional and religious hierarchies, resulting in the vulgarization of politics and the demolishing of the “sentiments” which he valued above all else. To Burke, government was a system of “pleasing illusions” which made “submission…obedience…subordination…[and] servitude” agreeable. Political economy threatened to “rudely [tear] off” the “decent drapery” that helped conceal the fact that government was really a system of hierarchical power and privilege. In other words, Burke believed government was a form of stage magic that could not survive the rational examination demanded by Smithian economics.
It should be emphasized that Burke was conceding that the class structure of his age was irrational, and that it did, in fact, consist of arbitrary “power,” “obedience,” and “loyalty to rank.” His concern was not with making society more just, or expanding people’s ability to pursue happiness; rather, he was concerned with preserving the mystique of politics—the devices by which the state’s hierarchical inequalities were euphemized.
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