To put it briefly, economism is the belief of economic rationality in nothing but itself. Gerhard Weisser, who was probably the first to use the concept, has taken a critical look at the self-sufficient circularity of an economistic mode of thinking:

It is a phenomenon with a long dogmatic history rich in assumptions manifesting themselves in a variety of forms. The three basic manifestations of economism are the development of a self-sufficient economic rationality, the representation of cost–benefit thinking as autonomous and absolute, and the elevation of the market logic to normative primacy, all of which lead to false totalities of a latently ideological kind.