Yefimov Vladimir
Abstract: The article is devoted to the history of formation of the mainstream economics. The author shows that business community played a decisive role in its formation, because was interested not in a scientific discipline, which would explore the economic reality, but in an economic discipline, which reflects an ideology favorable to this community. If by science one means the real (not imaginary) research practices adopted in the natural sciences, then in the history of economic thought one will find just few islands of science in the sea of philosophy, ideologies and utopias. Throughout the 20th century, the economics taught in universities performed exclusively ideological function of justifying and maintaining the existing social order: the Soviet order in the USSR and the market order in the West. After the fall of the Soviet order, Western aid projects in Russia were targeted to replace this order by the market one and to transform the economic education according to the Western model. This model involves not learning of the realities of market economy, but a market vision of social realities, which pictures all human relations as relations of exchange and buying-selling, and humans as seeking their self-interest with guile. The article shows how economics taught now in Russian universities was initially shaped in France, UK and the USA.
Keywords: Boisguilbert, Quesnay, Rousseau, Smith, Schmoller, Marshall Commons, Debré.