A classic line of this kind of book is for the author to pretend that they place themselves “beyond ideologies”, that is they only care about the well-being of the people without any preconception or desire about humanity rather than live, trade, die. This is what I call (the expression is not from me unfortunately): economics as an ideology. The idea that where people meet, our share legacy (see this review of Pierre Crétois’ La Part Commune in French for reflection on private property), is mostly in trade. A simple way to spot this is that discourse tends to focus around a bag of tricks and not a coherent vision of who we are, what we want and where we would like to go. As a matter of facts, “economic agents” in often used to designate people.