In the intellectual world, economists wanted to make their discipline seem ‘scientific’–more like physics and less like sociology–with the result that they dispensed with its earlier political and social connotations. While Adam Smith’s writings were full of politics and philosophy, as well as early thinking about how the economy works, by the early twentieth century the field which for 200 years had been ‘political economy’ emerged cleansed as simply ‘economics’. And economics told a very different story.
