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