For a critical archeology of “scientific” economics: utility function and enlightenment moral philosophy

Abstract

As Modern Economy developed as a “science”, its ideologic fundaments were both secularized and naturalized, after understanding the discipline under deterministic, mechanistic, and legalistic assumptions. But such fundaments were already among European discussions on moral philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Thus, even though the “utility function” was presented as a tool to the scientific status of the economy, it is regulated by the same extra-scientific foundations of the discipline. Later on, when presenting such conditionality, the condition of “science” of the economy is questioned, and arguments for a critical discussion of the ideological and cultural model that it entails and imposes its theory in practice.