An essay on the putative knowledge of textbook economics

The article pursues the two related questions of how economists pretend to know and why they want to know at all. It is argued that both the form this knowledge has taken and their motivation for knowing have undergone a fundamental change during the course of the 20 th century. The knowledge offered by important contemporary economic textbooks has little in common with objective and explicitly scientifically motivated knowledge. Rather, their contents and forms follow a productive end, aiming at the subjectivity of their readers.