His portrayal of socialism as a scientific fallacy originated in his early epistemological works in which he rejected the validity of all opodictic truths. Following Henri Poincaré, Rougier proposed that a scientific proposition, instead of being either a rational truth a priori, or an empirical truth a posteriori, could be a “hypothesis” or an “optional convention” picked for reasons of practical or theoretical convenience and tacitly accepted as such by the scientific community. Poincaré’s geometrical conventionalism, once extended to all disciplines, pointed to a “third way” which preserved the possibility of scientific objectivity while acknowledging the artificiality of reasoning and truth.

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, loc. 62