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The 20th-century saga of the economics profession in America is the story of how a humble quest to understand the "wealth of nations" became imbued with immense public prestige and finally, a strangely withered public purpose. Michael Bernstein portrays a profession that has ended up repudiating the state that nurtured it, ignoring distributive justice, and disproportionately privileging private desires in the study of economic life. Intellectual introversion has robbed it, he contends, of the very public influence it coveted and cultivated for so long. With wit and irony he examines how a community of experts now identified with uncritical celebration of "free market" virtues was itself shaped, dramatically so, by government and collective action. In arresting and provocative detail, Bernstein describes economists' fitful efforts to sway a state apparatus where values and goals could seldom remain separate from means and technique, and how their vocation was ultimately humbled by government itself. Replete with novel research findings, his worik also analyzes the historical peculiarities that led the profession to a key role in the contemporary backlash agains federal initiatives