I am sure Quiggin didn't intend it, but this came too perilously close to Margaret Thatcher's “There Is No Alternative” for comfort. These notions that serious intellectual work outside well-worn paths sanctioned by the established disciplines has often proven ineffectual when it comes to political rough and tumble; that every valid critique of neoclassical economics has already been made by someone else long ago and, furthermore, has been adequately absorbed by the cognoscenti; that you must voluntarily shackle yourself to the tropes of the modern economic orthodoxy if you have pretentions to be taken seriously; and that every doctrine should be judged in a cod–John Dewey fashion by its immediate proximate uses—all constitute major impediments to understanding how the left has failed in the current crisis.

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis …, loc. 58