In a given exercise we both can and should preserve comparative clarity, distinctness, and fixity, but the thought-material we are coercing never fully acquiesces in our fixations, and forces endless revision upon us no matter how we seek to withstand this.

The problem with any instrumental view of knowledge, and particularly an economic rationalist one, is that it fits with totalitarian political structures. Rather than being concerned to teach young people to think about their own society and to develop the knowledge and skills needed as citizens to maintain a democratic polity, knowledge within an economic rationalist frame of reference is about information and skills just for increasing productivity, usually in hierarchically organised firms. Economic rationalism treats people as objects – ‘human resources’ for the economy – as if the economy is an end in itself. Democratic societies have to insist that people are treated as subjects, the end point indeed for which all the systems of society, including the economic, exist. […]