From childhood to professional life, from the family to the workplace, the threads of a long training process are woven together: apprenticeships, injunctions, evaluations, tales of success and failure, promises of freedom through the market and consumerism. It is in this tightly woven fabric of practices and discourses that a certain self-evidence is forged: that of the rational, self-interested, calculating individual, summoned to constantly optimize his or her trajectory. To think about the economy is to question the process by which human beings come to understand themselves as economic subjects. By proposing a socio-anthropological philosophy of the history of economic thought, this book shifts the conception of economic philosophy beyond debates on rationality, efficiency or market mechanisms. It questions social and cultural conditions, the figures of rationality they mobilize and the experiences of the world they make visible or invisible. Bringing together economics, sociology, anthropology and philosophy, this book will appeal to readers keen to understand the presuppositions underlying our contemporary ways of telling and governing the world.