During the Second World War, the polemical use of the term “scientism” by Hayek complemented Popper’s refutation of “historicist” doctrines, Polanyi’s defense of pure science, Lippmann’s call for the restoration of a “liberal science,” and Rougier’s dichotomy of doctrine and mystique. Each demonstrated that liberal principles were concomitant with the proper view of science while a purely instrumental conception served the goals of collectivist ideologies. … From varying angles, they all accused the application of the aims and methods of the natural sciences to power social change of usurping the mantle of science out of sheer intellectual error. The opacity of the “sense-data” in the social sciences made its methods and orientation different than those of the natural sciences, because it could only observe man’s actions—and their undesigned results—without accessing the inner realm of consciousness. Opinions, they believed, constituted the genuine “facts” of the social sciences.

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, loc. 83