Paper prepared for the Revue de Philosophie Economique Symposium on Ideology and

Heterodox economists, along with many non-economists, have often leveled charges of ideological bias against mainstream economics and economists.1 In this paper I consider some of these charges, and discuss the degree to which I am persuaded by them. I begin with some heterodox charges of bias; then I consider some implicit charges made by the historian of science, S. A. Amadae, in a recent book (Amadae, 2003) together with some similar charges by Duncan Foley (Foley, 1975, 2003), since I believe their charges are representative of charges of ideological bias in economics sensed by a broader group of academics. The Heterodox Charges An example of the charges typically made by heterodox economists can be seen in the writings of the French Post Autistic economics movement, reported on by Edward Fullbrook (2003). Fullbrook, summarizing the views of the Post Autistic movement, argues that the economics profession is the “opposite of pluralistic ” and is “dogmatically tied to a value-laden neoclassical orthodoxy. ” As evidence of neoclassical theory’s ideological bias, he offers the fact that some distinguished American universities ar