Furthermore, wider cultural-political issues also mediate the legitimatory role of economics. In the United States in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, economics had persuasive force, particularly with the Nixon Administration, committed as it was to freeing markets from their Rooseveltian shackles. In contrast, in Malaysia in the late 1990s and the early 2000s a similar battle to permit derivatives trading was fought, but those engaged in it appealed for legitimacy to Islamic jurisprudence, not to neoclassical economics (Kamali 1997; Maurer 2001).

Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera, loc. 1194