Alasdair MacIntyre’s Whose Justice? Which Rationality? is an ambitious attempt to answer a deceptively simple question: how can rival and deeply opposed moral traditions argue with one another rationally, rather than merely assert power, preference, or authority? MacIntyre’s answer unfolds historically. Instead of beginning with abstract theory, he traces how different civilizations and traditions have understood justice, reason, and moral disagreement—and how those understandings emerged from concrete social crises.
This post provides the video, and an AI-generated outline of my talk on “Islamic Theory of the Firm: From Profits to Service” via ZOOM, 10-12pm PK time. Access SLIDES. Related Lecture: Islamic Methods of Management (English writeup/Urdu Video)
{bit.ly/3GIEC} During my recent visit to Indonesia, hosted by APSEII – an organization of state universities offering Islamic Economics Bachelor’s degrees – I was greatly encouraged by the rapid development of Islamic Economics education taking place across the country. At the APSEII Curriculum Review, over forty-five universities expressed their joint commitment to adopting a Third Generation curriculum. This collective step underscores Indonesia’s leading role in shaping the future of Islamic Economics.
{bit.ly/Mosk2Mark} Islamic economics was born as a revolutionary project. The pioneers of the field imagined a world where economic life would be rebuilt from the Qur’an and Sunnah, offering a genuine alternative to both capitalism and communism. Yet, over the decades, much of this ambition was lost. What emerged instead was a “Shariah-compliant” version of capitalism, adopting the tools and theories of neoclassical economics and dressing them in Islamic form.
In Three Generations of Islamic Economics (SSRN), I traced this history. The first generation, emerging from the struggles for liberation in colonized Muslim lands, rejected both capitalism and socialism, calling instead for a system built on Islamic teachings to promote justice and welfare. When political revolutions failed, the second generation took a pragmatic turn: attempting to build Islamic economics within the capitalist framework. But the global financial crisis of 2007–08 exposed both the flaws of capitalism and the weakness of this second-generation compromise. Out of this came the third generation, which seeks to recover the revolutionary vision of the first, recognizing that capitalism is fundamentally incompatible with Islamic ideals and finding ways to work around the power struggles involved in creating change. {LinkedIn Version of this post}
This historical backdrop explains the urgency of the argument in Redefining Islamic Economics (SSRN), where I proposed that Islamic economics must be understood not as a neutral science of scarcity, but as a struggle to align economic life with divine guidance — at the micro, meso, and macro levels. Similarly, Reviving the Promise of Islamic Economics (SSRN) showed how the revolutionary spirit was lost when economists settled for Islamizing capitalism. The result was confusion, co-optation, and the empty slogan: Islamic Econ = Capitalism – Interest + Zakat.
If compromise is the problem, then critique is necessary. That is why I wrote Empirical Evidence Against Neoclassical Utility Theory (SSRN). This paper confronts the central assumption of neoclassical economics — utility maximization — and demonstrates empirically that it does not describe real human behavior. The supposed rigor of neoclassical economics is a mathematical illusion, unsupported by evidence. Once this foundation collapses, Islamic economists cannot treat neoclassical tools as analytically neutral or methodologically rigorous.
Rejecting neoclassical economics leads directly to another neglected dimension: power. Modern economics deliberately omits it. Neoclassical theory arose partly as a reaction against Marxism, which foregrounded class and capitalist power. But money and finance are not neutral; they are shaped by political interests and struggles over control. In The Battle for the Control of Money (SSRN), I explored how power over money creation has always been contested — between states, elites, and communities. For Islamic finance, this means we face a choice: assimilate into capitalist institutions that perpetuate inequality, or resist them and work to empower the poor and vulnerable — knowing that such resistance will provoke opposition.
These two insights — the rejection of neoclassical theory and the recognition of power — also highlight why many popular reform proposals fail. Calls for full-reserve banking, sovereign money, crypto, or central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) promise technocratic fixes for deep systemic problems. But these proposals overlook the fact that money is not just technical; it is moral and political. In Technocratic Dreams, Political Realities: Evaluating Full Reserve Banking for Pakistan (link), I argue that such reforms amount to power-sharing compromises that rarely succeed. Real change requires two things that no technocratic fix can provide: moral transformation and realignment of power configurations. Without these, technical reforms are either blocked, captured by elites, or rendered ineffective.
The challenge, then, is not only critique but construction: how do we build Islamic economic institutions that embody Qur’anic principles while acknowledging both morality and power?
One answer lies in community-based models. In Islamic Finance and Community Empowerment: A Strategic Vision for the Global Ummah (SSRN), I propose repurposing Islamic banks through a dual bottom line: serving both profit and social goals. In partnership with mosque-based community organizations (MKJs), banks can channel resources into education, healthcare, microfinance, and grassroots empowerment — shifting from serving shareholders to serving the Ummah.
But banking reform is only part of the story. In Reclaiming Economics as a Moral Science: An Islamic Approach to Monetary Reform (link), I argue for embedding morality at the very heart of monetary systems, through a triangular ethical architecture: institutions, state regulation, and moral authority. Without this balance, reforms risk elite capture or state abuse.
Finally, Monetary Imperialism and the Third-Generation Islamic Economics (link) extends this vision globally. It shows how the dollar-dominated international monetary system perpetuates dependency and inequality — and argues that resistance must begin from below, with local currencies, qard-e-hasan institutions, zakat platforms, and food sovereignty. These small but concrete steps can gradually build transnational solidarity and economic independence.
Taken together, these works argue for a coherent reorientation of Islamic economics:
Reject neoclassical economics, which is neither rigorous nor reliable.
Recognize the role of power, for finance is never neutral.
Avoid illusions of technocratic fixes; real change requires moral and political transformation.
Build grassroots institutions that embody Islamic principles and serve the Ummah.
Assimilation into global capitalism is the easy path. But if Islamic economics is to fulfill its promise, it must choose the harder path of transformation — one that begins with rejecting flawed foundations, confronting realities of power, and building new institutions that express the timeless guidance of Islam.
W.H. McNeill’s The Rise of the West offered a sweeping, triumphalist narrative of Western superiority—and became a celebrated classic. But in a rare act of intellectual humility and moral courage, McNeill revisited the book twenty-five years later and quietly disowned its core assumptions. His retrospective essay reveals the hard-won wisdom of a lifetime: a recognition that history, as it is often told, serves not just truth—but power. This post draws out the critical and unfamiliar lessons from that reflection—lessons that challenge the dominant narratives most of us absorbed through our formal education.
Gems of wisdom can be extracted from a lifetime of learning. It’s not easy to disown your most celebrated work—especially when it has brought fame, admiration, and near-canonical status. But twenty-five years after publishing The Rise of the West, W.H. McNeill did just that. In a remarkable retrospective (“The Rise of the West” after Twenty Five Years), he was able to identify the triumphalist Eurocentrism at the heart of his classic. To revise a worldview you once taught the world takes not just insight, but integrity. It means allowing new knowledge, life experience, and emerging truths to unsettle deeply held beliefs. Few are willing to do this. But those who are—like McNeill—offer us a rare gift: the chance to learn, in a few pages, what it took them a lifetime to understand.
Historical narratives are instruments of power. In his reflective essay, McNeill recognized that The Rise of the West had portrayed Europe’s global rise as the natural culmination of human progress. But with time, he saw this not as a neutral observation, but as a deep structural bias—one that framed non-Western civilizations as supporting actors in a Western drama. He came to see his book, in his own words, as “an expression of the postwar imperial mood in the United States,” shaped by a “form of intellectual imperialism” that unconsciously mirrored American hegemony. The story he once told was not merely inaccurate—it helped legitimate global domination. [see: The Deadliest Weapon: Fabricated History]
Empire does not just conquer land—it colonizes minds. Power cannot survive on coercion alone; it must persuade, moralize, and justify. Eurocentric history played this role. It taught colonized peoples to view their subjugation as progress, and taught Western publics to see conquest as benevolence. The myth of the civilizing mission masked genocide, plunder, and forced cultural erasure. These stories became the moral architecture of empire—without them, domination could not endure.[See: Creating Islamic Alternatives to Eurocentrism, Seeing Through Empire: The Lies That Blind Us ]
Orientalism is not a lens—it is a worldview born of conquest. As Edward Said argued, imperial expansion created a superiority complex in the West, which distorted its view of the East into caricature. The knowledge produced about “the Orient” was shaped not by understanding, but by the needs of control. This epistemic dominance seeped into every discipline—from history to anthropology—and made alternative ways of knowing seem backward or invalid. [See Orientalism]
Global conquest also created an inferiority complex that still haunts the colonized world. When a civilization loses control over its own narratives, it loses faith in its own voice. Even today, many societies struggle to reclaim their precolonial intellectual traditions—not because those traditions are inadequate, but because conquest has severed the psychological and cultural pathways to them. Reconnecting with these roots is not nostalgic—it is necessary for any real development.[see: A Deep Seated Inferiority Complex]
Universities are not just centers of learning—they are engines of ideological reproduction. As Julie Reuben has shown, the modern research university systematically sidelined moral and religious inquiry in favor of supposedly objective, value-neutral science. But as she writes, “By the early twentieth century, moral and religious knowledge no longer defined the highest reaches of intellectual life. Science did.” This shift made it easier for institutions to present dominant narratives as natural and apolitical—when in fact, they served the needs of empire. Those who affirmed the dominant order advanced; those who challenged it were filtered out.[see Marginalization of Morality in Modern Education]
Prominence in academia is often the reward for ideological alignment—not intellectual merit. McNeill became a celebrated figure because his narrative reinforced the self-image of the West. In contrast, brilliant historians like L.S. Stavrianos and Marshall Hodgson, who refused to glorify the West, remained marginal. Their erasure was not a scholarly judgment—it was a political one. The academy does not merely record truth; it curates legitimacy.[see: Is Science Western in Origin?
Speaking truth to power is not a performance—it is a direct challenge to power’s foundations. When we dismantle the moral stories that make exploitation seem necessary, we threaten the very structures that depend on them. That is why dissent is punished, why alternative histories are buried, and why intellectual courage is so rare.[see: History As the Mother of Social Science]
We are living in a moment when cracks in the global order are creating space for truth. McNeill’s retrospective became possible only as Western hegemony began to falter. Today, we stand at a similar threshold. As old certainties crumble, we have a rare opportunity to reexamine the narratives that built them—and to imagine something better.[see Rebuilding Islamic Societies
Reshaping the world begins with reshaping the story. In a recent post, I’ve reflected on some of the concrete steps we can take to challenge dominant narratives and recover more truthful ones: How Capitalism Shapes Our World—and How We Can Reshape It. That work is not only possible—it is urgent.
Social science claims to describe the world as it is. Its theories, models, and graphs appear neutral, objective, and value-free — offering tools to understand, not to judge. But what if this objectivity is a mask? What if the theories that claim to reflect reality are actually reshaping it — guiding us, quietly but powerfully, toward a deeply flawed vision of what society should be?
Modern economic and social theory does not merely analyze human behavior; it idealizes a specific kind of human being — competitive, selfish, atomized — and then builds a blueprint for society around this creature. The result is not civilization, but something more akin to a jungle: a system where ferocious competition is glorified, moral values are dismissed as unscientific, and cooperation is treated as irrational.
This post explores how this transformation happened — how violence was hidden, how greed became virtue, and how theories that pretend to be passive observers are in fact active architects of the world we inhabit. Beneath the mask of objectivity lies a powerful ideology — one we must confront if we hope to build a more humane future.
Section I: Introduction — The Hidden Architecture of Power
Modernity teaches us to see the rise of Europe as a triumph of reason, science, and moral advancement. But what if this story is a carefully constructed illusion? The argument laid out in Economics After Empire: Rebuilding the Discipline on Moral Foundations turns this narrative on its head: Europe’s global dominance was not the result of superior intellect or values, but of a comparative advantage in financial innovation and organized violence. Through tools like central banking and secular morality, Europe transformed conquest into commerce, and greed into virtue — without ever admitting the cost.
This blog post serves as a roadmap to the argument and its many supporting threads. Woven into the narrative are links to articles, essays, and books that explore different facets of this thesis: how modern economics abandoned its moral roots; how secularism sanitized empire; how theories masquerading as neutral truths conceal class interests; and how history itself is rewritten by the victors.
Crucially, this is also a project of intellectual reconstruction. Economics was once a branch of moral philosophy, concerned not merely with wealth but with justice, virtue, and the good life. Today, it presents itself as a technical science divorced from ethics — a transformation that demands scrutiny.
As an alternative, we present Uloom ul Umran, the science of society pioneered by Ibn Khaldun. This methodology rejects universal laws and deterministic thinking; instead, it calls for grounding social theory in historical context, moral clarity, and the lived realities of communities. For an introduction to this framework and its broader implications, see our post: Reclaiming Lost Narratives: A New Approach to Social Science.
This post is both a narrative guide and an invitation — to look deeper, to question more, and to reclaim the moral imagination buried beneath the myths of modernity.
Section II: Social Theories in Context — A New Way to See the World
Social theories do not fall from the sky. They are born in moments of crisis, shaped by particular social groups, and crafted to serve specific interests. Yet modern education presents them as timeless truths: value-neutral frameworks for understanding society. This illusion of objectivity blinds us to the deeper truth: social theories are tools of power, not merely instruments of knowledge.
Uloom ul Umran, the science of civilization articulated by Ibn Khaldun, begins from a radically different premise. Societies evolve through distinct stages, and with them, so do the ideas used to explain and manage change. A theory that made sense in 18th-century Britain may become irrelevant — or dangerous — when transplanted into 21st-century Pakistan. Understanding the historical context that gave rise to a theory is essential to understanding its meaning, its purpose, and its limitations.
As shown Chapter 1: Methodology, the rise of secular capitalism was not the inevitable result of reason’s march, but a deliberate response to specific conflicts in European society. Theories that succeeded in Europe did so not because they were true — but because they aligned with the interests of powerful classes and were embedded in dominant worldviews.
This becomes clearer when we compare Marxist and capitalist economic theories. Each offers a description of society shaped by its political commitments. Marxism identifies exploitation and calls for revolution; capitalism naturalizes inequality and justifies profit. Both claim neutrality. Each reflects a class perspective.
Mainstream economics ignores this entirely. It teaches students that economic theories are value-free and universally valid — while concealing the social histories that birthed them. For a deeper critique of this ahistorical, Eurocentric mindset, see: Uloom ul Umran vs Eurocentric Social Science.
To decolonize our minds, we must learn to see ideas historically, not worship them as universal laws. Only then can we begin to craft social theories that serve our societies, rather than those who rule them.
Section III: Ruthless Modernity — The Moral Illusions of Empire
The myth of European superiority claims that the West conquered the world because of science, rationality, and moral progress. But this narrative hides a darker truth: Europe’s global dominance was built on violence, disguised as virtue. This is the central thesis of Ruthless Modernity — that power was cloaked in moral language, and conquest rebranded as commerce.
The real advantage Europe possessed was not truth or justice, but financial innovation paired with organized brutality. Institutions like the Bank of England were designed not to promote trade or welfare, but to fund endless war. Through accounting tricks and clever abstractions, the raw machinery of conquest was rendered invisible. Debt became development. Profit became progress. Empire became order.
This sanitized violence was made palatable by redefining morality itself. Where religion once taught that greed was a sin, modernity reclassified it as efficiency. Secularism, far from being neutral, served as an ideological tool to moralize empire. As William Corbeil argues in Empire and Progress, Enlightenment ideals were weaponized to erase indigenous worldviews and justify European dominance. What appeared as reason was often a refined form of domination.
To understand the modern world, we must begin by unlearning the stories we have been taught. Europe did not civilize the world — it redefined conquest as civilization.
Section IV: The Transformation of Morality — Greed as Virtue
How does a deadly sin become a civic virtue? Or, more pointedly: how did Ebenezer Scrooge — the miserly villain of Dickensian morality — morph into Scrooge McDuck, the clever and lovable symbol of entrepreneurial success? This moral reversal is not accidental. It reflects a deeper transformation in how society came to understand wealth, work, and virtue.
R.H. Tawney, in his classic Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, explores this transition. He shows how early Protestant theology — especially Calvinism — redefined the moral status of wealth. Where medieval Christianity had regarded avarice as a spiritual danger, Protestant thinkers came to view economic success as a sign of divine favor. Greed was not just tolerated — it was sanctified.
This transformation was essential to the rise of capitalism. A new moral vocabulary was required to justify a system that rewarded accumulation over compassion, and self-interest over sacrifice. As wealth became detached from moral obligation, it was no longer judged by how it was used, but simply by how much of it one could acquire. The pursuit of profit became not only permissible — but righteous.
These ideas still shape our world today. Neoliberalism builds on this moral inversion to portray inequality as the reward for merit and efficiency. Modern economics textbooks continue the tradition, teaching students to think about policy in terms of optimization and growth — while sidelining justice, dignity, and the public good.
Section V: Beyond True and False — The Positivist Trap
Modern economics encourages us to think in binary terms: policies are either true or false, effective or ineffective. If Inflation Targeting works in one setting, it should work everywhere. But this mindset — borrowed from the natural sciences — distorts the nature of social theories.
Take Job Guarantees. While widely debated, they’ve never been fully implemented. On the other hand, Communist regimes like the Soviet Union did guarantee employment for all workers. What can we learn from those experiences? Would such a policy “work” in Pakistan today? Answers to such questions depend not on abstract models, but on who will champion it, who will resist it, and whether it fits the local political and institutional realities.
Social theories are not equations — they are historical responses to crisis. Keynesianism, for example, was a solution to mass unemployment in post-Depression Britain. It succeeded not just because it was effective, but because it had elite backing, popular support, and fit the moral logic of its time.
As explained in Chapter 1: Methodology, success is always context-bound. A theory that thrives in one culture may fail in another. Attempts to apply Islamic finance using Western banking infrastructure have often produced shallow results — not because the ideas are flawed, but because they lack institutional alignment and cultural traction.
To evaluate a theory, we must move beyond positivist binary of true and false. Instead, we should ask: Who created it, for what purpose, and under what conditions can it succeed?
Section VI: Embracing the Normative to Rebuild Social Science
Seeing Through Empire: The Lies That Blind Us exposes the moral illusions that shaped the modern world. The next step is to imagine a better way to study — and shape — our societies.
Modern social science, built on the foundation of positivism, treats human beings like particles and societies like machines. It assumes we can discover laws of human behavior in the same way physicists discover laws of motion. But human beings are not reducible to formulas. We live by ideals, make moral choices, and imagine different futures. To treat society as a value-neutral system is to fundamentally misunderstand what it means to be human.
Economic theories idealize life in the jungle of ferocious competition, devoid of social responsibility. The consequences are all around us: climate catastrophe, permanent war, collapsing families and fraying communities. These outcomes are the product of a worldview that elevates efficiency, competition, and consumption while dismissing justice, compassion, and meaning.
A more grounded approach treats the study of society as a moral project. It involves a three-dimensional methodology:
Normative: a vision of the kind of world we want to build;
Positive: a clear understanding of current reality;
This approach is inspired by the Islamic intellectual tradition, particularly the work of scholars like Ibn Khaldun. But its relevance is universal. Every society, religious or secular, must ask: What kind of world are we trying to create?
Even modern economics follows this structure — just covertly. Its normative ideal is “perfect competition,” a marketplace of atomized, self-interested individuals. It recognizes distortions — monopolies, externalities, inequality — but seeks to “correct” them only to bring us closer to this highly questionable ideal. As shown in Building Humane Alternatives to Homo Economicus, what is taught as “rationality” is a thin disguise for sociopathic behavior.
The tragedy is not so much that economics has perverse ideals. The tragedy is that it pretends not to, leaving students blind to the moral conditioning embedded in their education. We need a better way. A methodology that embraces moral clarity, respects cultural context, and empowers us to shape a more humane future. For more details, see my post on Uloom ul Umran.
Section VI: Reclaiming Our Narrative — A Human-Centered Alternative to Positivism
Studying the economic theories of capitalism, as in The Golden Spell: Capitalism and the Sorcery of Power, exposes the moral illusions that shaped the modern world. The next step is to imagine a better way to study — and shape — our societies.
Modern social science treats human beings like particles and societies like machines. It assumes there are laws of human behavior similar to the laws of universal gravitation. But human behavior is not reducible to formulas. We live by ideals, make moral choices, and make sacrifices for visionary goals for the future. Economic theory derives policies for the real world by studying a hypothetical society of robots, subject to mathematical laws.
A more realistic approach treats society as a moral project. It involves a three-dimensional methodology:
Normative: a vision of the kind of world we want to build;
Positive: a clear understanding of current reality;
This approach is inspired by the Islamic intellectual tradition, particularly the work of scholars like Ibn Khaldun. But its relevance is universal. Every society, religious or secular, must ask: What kind of world are we trying to create?
Even modern economics follows this structure — just covertly. Its normative ideal is “perfect competition,” a marketplace of atomized, self-interested individuals. It recognizes distortions — monopolies, externalities, inequality — but seeks to “correct” them only to bring us closer to this highly questionable ideal. As shown in Building Humane Alternatives to Homo Economicus, what is taught as “rationality” is often a thin disguise for sociopathic behavior.
The tragedy is not that economics has ideals. The tragedy is that it pretends not to, leaving students blind to the moral conditioning embedded in their education. The outcomes of this moral blindness are in front of us in the form of a climate catastrophe, continuous wars, increasing inequality, and breakup of families and communities. Understanding the power of social science to shape society places the responsibility upon our should to find a better way: a methodology that embraces moral clarity, respects cultural context, and empowers us to shape a more humane future. For an overview of this broader project, see: Reclaiming Lost Narratives: A New Approach to Social Science
We’ve been taught that Europeans conquered the globe because they had the most advanced civilization. But what kind of civilization is built on conquests, exploitation, enslavement, and the deaths and destruction of millions around the globe?
Section 1: Introduction — Questioning the Grand Narrative
According to the standard narrative, Europe’s rise was driven by superior institutions, rational governance, and scientific advancement. Wealth, power, and modernity are seen as the natural outcomes of internal European virtues—innovation, efficiency, and discipline. Implicitly or explicitly, social sciences – economics included – are built on these foundations.
Yet this account is misleading—not because it is entirely false, but because it omits too much.
It leaves out the institutional machinery that made conquest and exploitation economically viable. It ignores the ideological work that redefined violence as civilization and plunder as progress. And most crucially, it forgets that economics itself was born within this imperial context—emerging to make sense of, and legitimize, the transformation of European society under capitalism, colonization, and industrial war. In his book entitled “How Economics Forgot History”, Geoffrey Hodgson shows that when economics cast off its historical roots in favor of timeless models and universal laws, it also forgot the very conditions that produced it.
What followed was a science unmoored from its origins—projecting European historical experience as a universal template. In “Rule of Experts”, Timothy Mitchell writes:
“The possibility of social science is based upon taking certain historical experiences of the West as the template for a universal knowledge.”
This essay is an invitation to reconsider that template. We will examine how conquest was made profitable, how its moral costs were abstracted away, and how a discipline meant to understand human welfare became complicit in its erosion. By recovering the history of the origins of economics, we may begin to imagine a morally grounded, globally relevant economics.
Section 2: Wealth as a Moral Goal — The Enlightenment Turn
Today’s economic discourse often treats the pursuit of wealth as self-evident, a natural expression of human behavior. But this framing is historically contingent. It emerged during the Enlightenment, when European thinkers sought to redefine the foundations of morality in a secular age. What replaced religion was not amorality, but a new moral logic—one that recast wealth, utility, and efficiency as virtuous ends in themselves.
Adam Smith, for example, was not the laissez-faire caricature invoked in modern textbooks. His Theory of Moral Sentiments emphasized sympathy, virtue, and the social fabric. He envisioned markets embedded within a moral order, not governed by self-interest alone. Similarly, Immanuel Kant aimed to build a universal ethics based on reason, not revelation—hoping to replace divine command with categorical imperatives.
Yet both projects faltered and ultimately failed. The emerging field of economics, especially after the Industrial Revolution, took a different turn—marginalizing moral philosophy in favor of price, preference, and incentive. Markets came to be evaluated not by whether they promoted human welfare, but by whether they increased measurable output. The concept of the good life—once central to both religious and philosophical traditions—was reduced to the maximization of consumption. But far from enhancing human flourishing, this shift undermines it: when satisfaction is pursued through material accumulation, it generates anxiety, social comparison, and ecological harm. In the name of utility, we sacrificed meaning. Tentative and hesitant efforts to restore richer notions of well-being—such as Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach or Martha Nussbaum’s work on human flourishing—have been unable to gain traction within mainstream economics, due to deep methodological commitments to positivism.
This shift from maximization of welfare to consumption laid the groundwork for instrumental rationality—a worldview where actions are judged solely by their consequences, not their ethical character. This allowed economic models to treat slavery, environmental degradation, or child labor as just another cost-benefit calculation.
What was once a search for a new moral order became a retreat from morality altogether. And in this void, wealth itself became the moral end, because it was observable and quantifiable.
Section 3: Finance, Empire, and the Business Model of War
The rise of Europe was not merely a triumph of ideas. It was also a triumph of accounting. Behind the banners of civilization and progress stood a powerful new business model: war as investment.
From the 17th century onward, European states developed what historians call the fiscal-military state—a political formation built on the capacity to borrow money to fund wars. Elites lent funds to monarchs, secured by future tax revenues or conquest spoils. Public debt markets, initially created to finance military campaigns, became sites of immense profit. Violence was no longer a cost to be absorbed—it was an asset to be monetized.
This transformation was institutionalized through a network of innovations:
Joint-stock companies, like the Dutch and British East India Companies, enabled private investors to share in the profits of empire.
Colonial banks and imperial insurance markets underwrote conquest and slavery.
Public credit systems turned war-making into a sustainable financial operation.
But this machinery of conquest did not run on economics alone—it was supported and justified by Europe’s leading philosophers. While proclaiming the ideals of liberty, reason, and universal rights, Enlightenment thinkers provided the intellectual scaffolding for empire:
John Locke, celebrated as a champion of liberty, was a shareholder in the Royal African Company, which trafficked enslaved Africans. He defended property rights over human bodies and rationalized expropriation in the Americas.
Voltaire invested in colonial companies and dismissed enslaved Africans as “animals.”
John Stuart Mill, heralded as a liberal paragon, spent his career at the British East India Company, shaping policies of control and extraction.
Even those not directly complicit helped craft the moral narrative of “civilizing the savage”—a project that turned atrocities into obligations. Philosophy, law, and economics evolved together, constructing a vision of development in which Europe’s violence was invisible, necessary, or even benevolent.
The outcomes were brutally real. In the transatlantic slave trade, finance and logistics reduced human beings to shipping units. In Leopold’s Congo, mutilation and death were bureaucratized into rubber quotas and profit margins.
These are not historical footnotes—they are the foundations of modern capitalism. What mattered was not how wealth was acquired, but that it could be measured, securitized, and multiplied.
This system also enabled moral detachment. Shareholders in the East India Company did not swing the whip; bondholders funding imperial wars never saw the blood. Profit required distance, and capitalism delivered it.
The same structure persists today: war contractors and extractive firms thrive amid chaos. In public ledgers and economic models, destruction still counts as growth.
Section 4: The Myth of Progress — Deception as Structure
To turn empire into an acceptable enterprise required more than weapons and finance—it required ideology. Violence had to be narratively transformed into virtue, and suffering reframed as the price of modernization. This was not accidental; it was a deliberate and systematic project of moral camouflage.
The Enlightenment, while championing reason and rights, also helped to construct the ideological vocabulary that made conquest palatable. Words like “progress,” “civilization,” “commerce,” and “development” became euphemisms for domination. They promised uplift while delivering exploitation. They cast indigenous ways of life as backward, non-European cultures as childlike, and European violence as benevolent intervention.
Philosophers, historians, and economists contributed to this narrative architecture. The civilizing mission was framed as a moral obligation; colonization was rationalized as a necessary step in the linear evolution of societies. In this framework, the colonized were not victims but beneficiaries—reluctant passengers on a one-way train toward Western modernity.
This ideological work was reinforced by the emerging social sciences, especially economics and political theory, which offered tools of abstraction. The messy realities of hunger, death, and dispossession were converted into charts and ratios. Colonial violence disappeared behind the veil of data.
This is what Timothy Mitchell described as the defining move of modern social science: to take a particular historical experience—Europe’s—and present it as a universal model, to which all societies would be compared and toward which they were expected to evolve. What could not be measured was dismissed; what could be quantified was naturalized.
The result was not just a myth, but a structure of deception. It normalized inequality, laundered violence through developmental rhetoric, and produced a world where the victims of empire were asked to be grateful.
And as markets came to define society, wealth became the measure of all things. “All is fair in love and war” morphed into an economic ethos: no moral constraints bind the pursuit of pleasure and power. These became the supreme values of life. It is a deeply reductive and primitive vision of human welfare—what might be called the Viking model of development—in which conquest, consumption, and dominance are taken as the hallmarks of progress.
Economists use a framework in which maximization of personal pleasure becomes the central goal of life, and moral considerations are absent. As a result, economic agents are assumed to lie, cheat, steal, and betray when it serves their interest—This the ideal of rational behavior embedded in textbook economic models. We will return to this hidden moral architecture later. For now, we turn to how it distorts even our measurements of growth and wealth.
Section 5: The Illusion of Wealth — Creative Destruction at a Global Scale
Economic growth, as measured by GDP, is often treated as a proxy for national success. But what does this metric actually capture—and what does it conceal?
It is enlightening to revisit Joseph Schumpeter’s concept of “creative destruction”: the idea that economic progress depends on the continual destruction of outdated industries to make way for innovation. Today, this logic can be expanded to justify far more: wars, displacements, ecological collapse—all become acceptable side-effects in service of growth.
At a global level, this logic leads to disturbing outcomes. Wars destroy infrastructure and lives—but then reconstruction creates jobs, generates contracts, and boosts GDP. Defense spending, even when funding senseless destruction, is counted as productive output. From the economist’s perspective, both the missile and the rebuilding of the hospital it destroyed are economic activity. The net effect on human welfare is irrelevant.
This isn’t a theoretical problem. It defines modern economic policy. In post-conflict zones, GDP often spikes—not because life is improving, but because aid flows, construction contracts, and military logistics operations flood the formal economy. Every bomb dropped and every road rebuilt adds to the bottom line. Destruction is not a disruption; it is a feature.
As Stiglitz, Sen, and Fitoussi have argued, GDP measures economic throughput, not human wellbeing. It ignores inequality, ecological harm, unpaid care work, and the erosion of public goods. A nation can become poorer in every meaningful sense—sicker, more divided, more fragile—while its GDP rises.
And yet, GDP remains our dominant scoreboard. Economists are trained to focus on efficiency, not justice; on measurable flows, not moral consequences. But if wealth includes destruction, and if growth includes suffering, we must ask: Is this really wealth? Is this really progress?
Section 6: Why Economists Stay Silent — The Positivist Trap
If the history of conquest is so central to global inequality, and if the discipline of economics itself evolved in that imperial context, why do most economists not see it?
The answer lies in a powerful methodological commitment that shapes the field: positivism. According to this framework, only observable, measurable phenomena are valid objects of scientific inquiry. Motivations, moral values, and ethical commitments—being subjective and unmeasurable—are excluded from formal models. Over time, this has led to a conception of economics as a value-free science, concerned only with “what is,” not “what ought to be.”
But this neutrality is an illusion. As philosophers like Hilary Putnam, Hausman and McPherson, and others have argued, facts and values are inextricably entangled in social science. Economic models that exclude morality do not become neutral—they simply embed a hidden moral architecture, one that often privileges wealth, efficiency, and individualism without ever naming them as values.
Economists are trained to treat human beings as pleasure-maximizing agents, motivated solely by self-interest. The rational actor in standard models is expected to betray trust, exploit others, and ignore obligations if the payoff is right. Cooperation, generosity, or loyalty appear irrational—unless they can be repackaged as “strategic behavior.”
This has profound implications for policy. Take healthcare rationing: cost-effectiveness models often assign treatments based on QALYs—a measure that calculates how many “quality” years a medical intervention can provide per dollar spent. At first glance, it appears neutral and efficient. But as Hausman and McPherson point out, this framework implicitly values the lives of the young over the old, the healthy over the disabled, and the rich (who can pay) over the poor. The moral commitments are buried in the arithmetic, rendering life-and-death decisions as “technical” problems.
This training has profound consequences:
War and violence vanish from models—These are not market activities, and not prices.
Inequality is explained, not questioned—the result of preferences, skills, or productivity, rather than systems of power.
Activism and moral critique are discouraged—as if social systems were governed by natural laws, not shaped by human decisions.
In this framework, asking whether capitalism is just, or whether GDP growth is desirable, appears unscientific. The discipline presents itself as a mirror to reality—when in fact, it is a map drawn with particular interests and assumptions in mind.
As my paper on Normative Foundations of Scarcity argues, even core concepts like scarcity are loaded with unacknowledged normative assumptions: about property, entitlement, and distribution. These assumptions are treated as facts—rendering the discipline impervious to moral critique.
This silence is not accidental. It is produced by a methodology that equates science with abstraction, and abstraction with truth. But in the process of purging values, economics has purged meaning—and with it, the tools needed to understand suffering, injustice, and the human condition.
Section 7: Toward a Global Moral Economics
If we are to move beyond a model of economics that abstracts away from ethics, violence, and global justice, we need more than critique—we need a new vision. A vision that treats human beings not as isolated calculators of utility, but as members of a shared moral community. A vision grounded not in scarcity and competition, but in cooperation, dignity, and care.
Such a vision is not utopian—it is empirically supported and increasingly urgent.
First, the assumption of inherent selfishness is no longer credible. Recent findings in evolutionary biology, anthropology, child development, and behavioral economics have shown that humans are naturally cooperative, altruistic, and socially responsible. These traits are not anomalies; they are core to our survival as a species. The model of homo economicus is not just ethically impoverished—it is biologically inaccurate.
Second, the pursuit of wealth does not lead to happiness. The Easterlin Paradox and decades of well-being research have shown that after a certain threshold, additional income has little impact on life satisfaction. Once basic needs are met, relationships, purpose, and social trust matter far more than consumption. Economies organized around endless accumulation thus misdirect human effort—producing ever more, while delivering ever less joy.
Third, capitalism’s need for excess production has generated a culture of artificial desire. To sustain profits, corporations manufacture needs—whether for sugar, tobacco, gadgets, or status symbols. People work harder to afford things that do not improve their lives. This creates a treadmill: desire → labor → production → profit, with well-being as a neglected externality. The resulting rat race creates misery for all, and is destroying the planet.
A moral economics would begin with a different premise: that the good life is simple, social, and ethical. That human welfare is grounded in character, community, and mutual care. That freedom does not mean choosing between brands, but living in a world where trust, dignity, and love are abundant.
Such an economics would not abandon rigor. It would broaden its foundations, embracing cooperation as rational, sustainability as necessary, and justice as non-negotiable.
Tentative beginnings have been made—through Sen’s capabilities approach, Martha Nussbaum’s theory of human flourishing, and other efforts to reintroduce ethics into economic thought. But these alternatives have been unable to gain traction, because the methodological straitjacket of positivism, still defines the boundaries of acceptable mainstream economic theorizing.
Section 8: Conclusion — From Analysis to Action
As the Marxist historian L.S. Stavrianos wrote in The Global Rift, the wealth of the West and the poverty of the East are opposite sides of the same coin. While generations of scholars have explained the “rise of the West” by internal virtues—rationality, innovation, individualism. The other half of this story, the fall of the East, brought about through conquest, looting, and economic subjugation offers a simple insight that has eluded more complex theories: the West became rich by making the East poor.
This truth remains absent from most accounts of global development. The rise of Europe is celebrated, while the parallel collapse of civilizations in Asia, Africa, and the Americas is treated as incidental—or worse, as evidence of cultural inferiority. For centuries, racist ideologies portrayed non-Europeans as irrational, lazy, or subhuman, casting colonial domination as benevolent uplift. These narratives have functioned as moral blinders—constructed to obscure the violence and devastation that accompanied Europe’s ascent. Once we learn to see past these self-justifying fictions, a very different picture emerges. A realistic accounting of the damage done—the lives destroyed, the cultures erased, the suffering inflicted on millions—reveals that the rise of the West came at enormous cost to the rest of the world, and to humanity as a whole.
Mainstream theories of economics played a central role in sustaining the illusion. They created the intellectual architecture that made conquest appear efficient, and exploitation appear productive. By defining rationality as self-interest, by treating markets as morally neutral, and by elevating growth above justice, the discipline became a tool of empire.
At the heart of this legacy lie two foundational errors. First, economics has remained confined to the nation-state, reducing people to participants in competing economies instead of recognizing them as members of a shared human family. Second, it has reduced the meaning of welfare to the maximization of consumption, ignoring the deeper sources of human flourishing: purpose, relationships, and dignity.
Recognizing these realities compels us to rethink the foundations of economics—and to imagine what the discipline might become if it were oriented toward justice, truth, and humanity.
Two reforms are essential.
First, economists must move beyond the nation-state as the unit of analysis. As long as models measure growth and welfare within national borders, conquest and exploitation will appear rational—because the benefits to the dominant country are never weighed against the costs to the dominated. When we begin to theorize at the level of humanity, war becomes a negative-sum game. So does environmental destruction. The global defense budget alone could provide food, education, and healthcare for every human being on the planet. Seen from this broader perspective, peace is not idealism—it is economic common sense. And it reveals a deeper truth: scarcity is not natural—it is manufactured by conflict, competition, exploitation, and oppression. Peace is the path to shared prosperity.
Second, we must redefine the meaning of human welfare. The pursuit of consumption as a proxy for happiness has proven empty. As both science and lived experience affirm, it is love, community, trust, and purpose—not material accumulation—that give life meaning. Capitalism teaches us to sacrifice families for careers, relationships for profit, integrity for advancement. But this model does not enrich us—it hollows us out. Reclaiming a richer vision of the good life is not only ethically right, it is aligned with human nature.
Together, these two shifts point to a new ethos: think globally, act locally. The systems we face are vast, but we are not powerless. Change begins with a shift in how we live, what we value, and how we treat the people around us. Every life is infinitely precious. If we truly believe that, we can no longer accept a system that treats human beings as disposable inputs in a global machine.
We cannot control the outcomes. But we can take responsibility for the process. If we struggle for justice, we may or may not succeed in transforming the world. But the struggle itself will transform us.
{bit.ly/AZrms} In the late 19th century, Belgian investors were earning steady returns on a booming new commodity: Congolese rubber. On the ground, the reality behind those profits was something else entirely—villages razed, limbs severed, quotas enforced at gunpoint.
And yet, in the financial districts of Brussels and Antwerp, there were no signs of blood. Only dividends.
This pattern—of brutality rendered invisible by distance, by bureaucracy, by financial abstraction—was not an aberration. It was part of a much larger system that powered Europe’s global ascendancy. That ascendancy is usually attributed to Enlightenment reason, scientific progress, and liberal institutions—a self-congratulatory story retold in textbooks, histories, and memoirs.
Our article on “Ruthless Modernity” offers a different account. It traces how conquest was made profitable, how stock markets fattened on a feast for crows, and how entire empires were built on the transformation of moral decisions into economic instruments.
As the African proverb says: Until the lions learn to write, tales of the hunt will glorify the hunter. For centuries, Europe has told the story of its own rise as a civilizing mission. This article gives voice to those they “civilized.” It shows how conquest was sanitized, how finance abstracted suffering into profit, and how the vocabulary of progress was used to erase the cost in human lives.
It argues that Europe’s real advantage lay not just in its technology or science, but in its ability to turn violence into a sustainable business model—and to mask that violence behind ledgers and liberalism.
One of the most powerful tools in this transformation was the partnership between governments and wealthy elites. Instead of taxing citizens to fund war, states borrowed money from financiers. In return, investors received interest payments guaranteed by future taxes. The Bank of England, bond markets, and joint-stock companies were not invented to regulate economies—they were invented to make war pay. Investors did not see corpses. They saw dividends.
And war was only part of it. Europe also pioneered a global trade soaked in violence—later sanitized in textbooks as “the triangular trade.” Human beings were bought and sold like cargo. Scientific innovation was directed toward more efficient weapons. Morality itself was repurposed to serve the new economy. Slavery became civilizing. Profit became patriotic. And financiers calculated the costs and benefits of war as if balance sheets could measure the worth of destroyed cultures, ruined ecosystems, and shattered lives. The ledgers tallied profits—but ignored the true cost borne by humans, animals, and the biosphere.
To keep this system running, capitalism required more than tools. It required stories. New narratives were crafted—ones that framed exploitation as development, and genocide as the spread of civilization. These weren’t just masks—they were lullabies. Carefully composed to soothe Europe’s conscience while the machinery of plunder kept spinning.
Our full article on Ruthless Modernity: A Moral History of the West digs deeper into this history. Not the official chronicles, but the records buried under euphemisms, profits, and power. It is not a manifesto – It’s a flashlight. It begins to uncover the hidden mechanics of modern institutions—the quiet ways in which they erased moral agency and turned mass suffering into economic efficiency.
This isn’t just about the past. It’s about the systems we still live within. It’s about student loans, stock markets, and climate change. It’s about why the poor are blamed and the powerful are praised. It’s about why horrors continue in plain sight—wars, displacements, starvation—while markets rise and pundits applaud.
Speaking truth to power is liberating. Like the rising sun, truth dispels darkness—unmasking tyrants and restoring the voices of the silenced.
“Until lions get their own historians, tales of the hunt will always glorify the hunters.” — African Proverb
{bit.ly/AZrln} History is written by the victors. Power is the ability to construct and spread self-glorifying narratives, erasing alternative worldviews, demonizing the vanquished, and suppressing dangerous knowledge. While this is easy to see for political history, modern social science is a far more powerful fabrication of power—it borrows the prestige of the physical sciences to propagate Eurocentric ways of seeing the world.
To see through the illusions, sustained by the prestige of modern social science, we must trace its historical roots and uncover how it was created. This is the aim of our project: to rebuild the social sciences on radically different foundations, drawing from the insights of Ibn Khaldun.
Modern social science is built on a hidden framework — one that seeks to apply universal laws to human societies, as if they were mechanical systems rather than complex historical entities shaped by power and culture. But what if this approach itself is fundamentally flawed?
In this chapter, we turn to Ibn Khaldun, one of the greatest thinkers of history, who offered a radically different approach to studying societies. Unlike modern economists and sociologists, who search for timeless mathematical models, Ibn Khaldun saw civilizations as organic, rising and falling in cycles based on social cohesion, political power, and economic structures. His method, which he called Uloom ul Umran, focuses not on abstract theories but on understanding how real societies change over time.
Modern social sciences have largely ignored or marginalized the historical methodology of Ibn Khaldun. Since the early 20th century, economics textbooks exposit a methodology that claims universal applicability across time and space, like physics. This chapter lays the groundwork for rethinking social science—not as a search for universal laws but as an exploration of the forces that shape civilizations, the narratives that sustain them, and the knowledge they produce.
Chapter 2: Studying Social Change—From the Roman Empire to Christendom
If knowledge is shaped by power, then history is not just remembered—it is rewritten. Those who rise to power do not simply impose their rule; they also reshape the past to justify their dominance. Nowhere is this clearer than in the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of Christendom.
For centuries, Rome stood as one of the greatest civilizations of the ancient world. Yet, when it collapsed, its legacy was not preserved as a golden age—it was reframed as a corrupt and decadent empire that had to be destroyed for a new order to emerge. The Christian Church, now in control, rewrote Rome’s history to position itself as its true heir. Knowledge that did not fit this new narrative was discarded or erased.
This pattern of historical erasure repeated itself centuries later with the Renaissance, often described as Europe’s intellectual rebirth. Yet this framing conceals the reality that much of the knowledge that fueled the Renaissance came from outside Europe—especially from the Islamic world, which had preserved, expanded, and transformed classical learning. However, because European power dictated the writing of history, these contributions were erased, and the Renaissance was rebranded as a purely European achievement.
By looking at these moments of transition, we uncover a deeper truth: history is not just about what is remembered, but about what is forgotten. If past civilizations could not see how their own master narratives shaped their thinking, how can we be sure that we are not also trapped within a carefully crafted illusion?
Looking Ahead: Historical Origins of Modernity
If the past has taught us anything, it is that knowledge is not neutral—it is produced through struggle. The transition from the Renaissance and the Enlightenment to secular modernity reshaped how nearly all of humanity understands history, philosophy, and social science. Through the spread of Western education, Eurocentric assumptions became embedded into curricula across the world, defining how we see progress, reason, and civilization itself.
What happens when we begin to challenge this framework? What ideas have been erased that are still worth retrieving? These are the questions I will explore in later chapters of this textbook. Join the mailing list at bit.ly/AZIEML to get monthly email updates about this forthcoming textbook. The homepage for the textbook is at bit.ly/3gie
{bit.ly/AZnpf} Modern economics faces a profound crisis, as it struggles to address the complex realities of human societies. Second Generation Islamic Economics (2GIE) faces a similar crisis, since it was built as a branch and a variant of modern economics. Instead of modifying modern economics, My book on Islamic Economics: The Polar Opposite of Capitalist Economics, explained how the two approach – Capitalism and Islam – could not be combined, since they were fundamentally opposed to each other. Third Generation Islamic Economics (3GIE) rejects it in toto, and rebuilds the entire discipline on Islamic foundations. By addressing fundamental flaws in modern economics and building upon the intellectual tradition of Islam, 3GIE offers a bold alternative for understanding human behavior and societal organization. For more details, see the homepage for a textbook for 3GIE, currently under preparation.
This post introduces a collection of articles that outline the foundations and methodology of 3GIE, charting a path forward for this transformative intellectual project.
The limitations of Second Generation Islamic Economics (2GIE) stem from its uncritical adoption of Western economic methodologies and frameworks. This article diagnoses the crisis within 2GIE and sets the stage for a more authentic and independent approach. By critically examining the history and evolution of Islamic economics, it lays the groundwork for the radical shift represented by 3GIE.
This follow-up critique builds upon the issues identified in 2GIE and sketches the contours of a transformative solution. It challenges both conventional economics and earlier iterations of Islamic economics, emphasizing the need for a framework that integrates moral purpose, historical context, and a deep understanding of human nature.
A core innovation of 3GIE is its emphasis on introspection and self-knowledge as the foundation for understanding human behavior. Modern economics dismisses subjective insights as unscientific, but this article argues that self-awareness provides the most reliable basis for constructing realistic models of human behavior. This methodological shift rejects positivism and reclaims the subjective as central to the study of human societies.
Why is self-knowledge so elusive in the modern world? This article explores the systematic efforts to distort our understanding of identity and purpose. It highlights how introspection is undermined by powerful narratives that misguide individuals about their true nature. Overcoming these barriers is essential to building the foundations of 3GIE.
[5] Reimagining Economics: Historical Sensitivity and Human Welfare as Core Principles
This article critiques two fundamental methodological flaws in modern economics. First, the detachment of social theories from their historical context leads to the false portrayal of economic laws as universal truths. Second, the reduction of human welfare to material consumption ignores the deeper sources of happiness and well-being. 3GIE seeks to correct these defects by providing a contextual and historically embedded approach that aligns with the true drivers of human flourishing.
A Unified Vision for Economics and Society
Together, these articles provide an overview of the intellectual foundations and methodological innovations of 3GIE. By integrating moral purpose, self-knowledge, and historical awareness, this new paradigm offers a practical framework for addressing the pressing challenges of the modern world. For more information about how you can participate in this project to rebuild our economics systems to provide justice and equity, and cater to human welfare, see Rebuilding Economics on Islamic Moral Foundations.
An Islamic WorldView 