ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 showed that during the nineteenth-century rise of Neoclassicism, as Anthropology was discovering ‘culture’ and cultural difference, economic marginalists were moving in the opposite direction by dismissing the influence of shared sensibilities, habits, and practices of a society-culture-on economic action and knowledge. Neoclassical economics offered individual utility maximization as a universal truth of human behavior; and the rhetorical device of Robinson Crusoe paved the way for the theoretical erasure of culture, that is, removing it from the space of economic knowledge.
