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Mainstream economics has long prided itself to be an empirical “science”, at least in aspiration if not yet in practice. Yet, some of the most elementary, commonplace premises of the discipline are flatly contradicted by the empirical findings of cultural anthropology. Karl Polanyi made this point:

This paper aims to explain how economics severed itself from the moral constraint of community and from ethics.

The paper utilizes respected economic histories (e.g. Tawney, Polanyi, Heilbroner) and analyzes central theoretical texts of modern capitalism (e.g. Adam Smith).

This paper concludes that the divorce of economics from community and ethics had historical causes, beginning with enclosure, and was then theoretically justified by the classical economics.

The paper suggests that, if social economics wish to reconnect economics with ethics, they need first to understand and to contend with, better than they have, the enormity of the historical and theoretical forces that drove the two apart in the first place.

While many social economists argue for the need to connect economics with ethics, few if any have offered an extended analysis of their divorce.