Peter van der Veer

What economists and political scientists today call the __ational choice of individuals,_ but what Smith called __he individual pursuit of happiness,_ leads according to this view in a mechanical way to general welfare. As Alexander Pope in his Essay on Man put it: __rue Self Love and Social are the same._ While this is the foundation of liberal capitalism, Marx__ dialectical materialism is not different in its selection of the economy as the prime mover. In this way the economy becomes the most important purpose of society. Fortunately, the economy has laws of causation, or, at least, that is what economists would like us to believe. Statistics are gathered to provide an objectified view of reality that enables social engineering. The individual and the collective are simultaneously put in an economic framework that is secular not in the sense that it is nonreligious, since individuals can rationally pursue religious ends, but in the sense that a God-given order of society has been replaced by an order that is constantly produced by homo economicus_ (p. 41).