It is about belief in government as God-substitute and politics as social redemption. The social democratic state is considered to have the power and the knowledge to create positive social outcomes. Look at the rhetoric of the critics of economic rationalism . Under this overweening confidence in politics and government, there is a great narrowing of the concept of the realm of the social. Social action is relentlessly conceived as political action.
Social outcomes are conceivable of as directly malleable to policy action.
So overblown is this moral-logical superstructure, it is taken to be the end of politics , to be threatening an ungoverned economy , if government action is mildly lessened in a few areas, even though it continues to expand elsewhere. Precisely because we are talking in the end about moral posturing, and claims for moral and intellectual status, the critics of economic rationalism rarely engage in serious discussion of economic history. Instead, one gets discussion of ideas, their alleged provenance and effects, in an event free zone. Hence burblings about the dreadful effects of the scaling back of government when government has continued to expand, or that unemployment and foreign debt are the results of economic rationalism when the growth and entrenchment of both pre-date the influence of economic rationalism . Defending one s intellectual capital and claims to higher moral status certainly provide understandable motivations for many of the critics of pro-market policies.