In 1919, when Australia’s sole Economics Professor RB Irvine was invited to share his expertise in the Sydney press, he took the opportunity to attack the ‘blind confidence and obstinacy of employers and capitalists’. The economic status quo, he preached from the ivory tower, was ‘radically defective’, and must give way to a new order characterised by ‘social justice’, ‘industrial democracy’ and ‘state socialism’. Five years later, Irvine had been forced into early retirement, and his status as the nation’s pre-eminent economist was usurped by DB Copland, newly appointed Commerce Professor at the University of Melbourne. For Copland, Irvine’s ethical—and indeed political—concerns had no place in economic inquiry. In his view economics was a ‘science’, akin to the ‘natural sciences’, in which ‘truth can be sought without prejudice or bias’. Within less than a decade, ‘economics’ as a discipline and a profession had undergone a radical transformation. Only recently led by self-conscious ideologues with leftist agendas, economics was now dominated by positivist scientists who searched for objective truth. This paper probes this abrupt transition, and shows how economics’ avowed depoliticisation in fact set the stage for economists to wield unprecedented political influence amid a wider turn to technocracy.