Pat Gunning's learned discussion of scientism in the New Deal is
full of good truths, but blemished, alas, by a kind of Alf Landon bias, as
though FDR were the first and greatest pied piper to invoke the cult of
science to lead his followers. Scientism in one form or another has been
with us as long as there were gullible listeners, and humbugs to orate.
Edgeworth, for example, wrote in mathematical riddles to promote his
"felicific calculus" while bolstering his considerable property rights and
his power to turn egalitarian economists out of Oxbridge. The great
satirist/philosophers of history have lampooned scientism for centuries. One
thinks of Erasmus, Spinoza, Swift, and John Locke.  Here is Locke:

	"It is ambition enough to be employed as an under-labourer in .
removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge, which
certainly had been much more advanced in the world if the endeavors of
ingenious and industrious men had not been much cumbered with the learned
but frivolous use of uncouth, affected, or unintelligible terms . . Vague
and insignificant forms of speech, and abuse of language, have so long
passed for mysteries of science . that it will not be easy to persuade
either those who speak or those who hear them that they are but the covers
of ignorance, and hindrance of true knowledge."  - Essay Concerning Human
Understanding, "The Epistle to the Reader".

	Open almost any modern economics journal and you will see how little
the world has changed since 1690, in spite of Locke's efforts.  If the
intellectuals heeded him once, they have regressed.  It's a massive herd
behavior, hard to stem.

	Here is historian James Breck Perkins on 18th Century France:

"Bigotry went hand in hand with immorality.  ...  the contest over Jansenism
was waged w/o intermission.  The articles of belief so fiercely discussed
were metaphysical subtleties ...  which now seemed w/o meaning to
intelligent men.  ...  the intolerance of the Jesuits and the higher clergy
had become unbearable.  The Jansenists were loved for the enemies they had
made."

"An institution which had absorbed a large proportion of the wealth of the
community and refused to share in the public burdens, ...  which declared
eternal salvation to depend upon the acceptance of incomprehensible
subtleties ... could not continue to control mens' minds ..."  - Perkins,
*France under the Regency*, pp. 10-12.  

As a result, King Louis XV expelled the Jesuits from France in 1764.  Is
this a predictor of the fate of economic theory in America in the 21st
Century?

Before that there the Scholastics, of course, who recycled Aristotle, and
before that there were mystics and witch-doctors and cave-men, ... etc.

Mason Gaffney