Au prétexte que cet économiste avait commencé à écrire, à Toulouse, en 1765, ses fameuses Recherches sur la nature et les causes de la richesse des nations, elle avait fait de ce père du libéralisme une sorte de gourou derrière lequel elle s’abritait pour justifier tous les excès du capitalisme moderne. Ainsi vantait-elle les positions optimistes d

What might surprise Weber most—and what would be an outright shock to Karl Marx if we were to unfreeze him with Weber in Jabba the Hutt’s lair—is that capitalism has been so durable. Marx thought capitalism was a weak, evil invention that would inevitably attack itself, eat itself, and disappear.

From the standpoint of Ely and the new generation economists, economic analysis and its application made up an inherently ethical task whose basic unit of analysis was the social whole. In this sense, their pronouncements were not socialist in a Marxist sense—that is, implying public ownership of capital and the ultimate displacement of capitalism—