Perhaps no charge has been leveled against Austrian economists more than any other to dismiss their scientific contribution as the claim that they are dogmatic ideologues. This is, of course, ironic because the Austrians from Menger on insisted on their "value-freedom" in a Weberian sense of means-ends analysis. In fact, Gunnar Myrdal in his analysis of the political influences on economic theory points out that the Austrians are the least guilty. But the debates with both Keynesianism and market socialism, and the staunch stance that both Mises and Hayek held, led to the impression that dogmatic ideologue was the best label for these two and their followers. Such a claim is made often at the expense of any understanding at all of the scientific propositions upon which the ideological statement is derived.
An example of this genre of critique can be found in Kenneth Hoover's Economics as Ideology. Here is my review of this book.
Obviously ideology is an important part of political economy. Joseph Schumpeter went as far as to claim that science was perhaps not even possible in economics without ideology. Ideological vision is a pre-analytic cognitive act that provides the raw material for scientific analysis. Thankfully economics as a discipline now-a-days is more comfortable addressing questions of ideological commitment, self-delusion, expressive voting, biased beliefs, the role of religion, etc., without necessarily dismissing such forays into the complex world of how beliefs give rise to actions and actions led to consequences.
The kind of "hermeneutics of suspicion" and "pyscho-babble" presented in the Hoover book has given way to serious examination of the role of ideology in economic systems, and the ability to assess analytical arguments on their own terms rather than dismiss simply because the conclusions cut against the conventional wisdom.
Perhaps I am being too optimistic about the future of economic discourse and the argument for a more pessimistic reading of the situation is reinforced everytime one reads Paul Krugman's childish attacks on economists of the right, and Joe Stiglitz's conspiracy theories about those in power when in fact he was one of them. But I remain hopeful ... perhaps my own self-delusion.
Frederic Sautet has posted a few times already on this topic of ideology and public policy, for example, here,and here.
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