Margaret Thatcher once remarked that there was no such thing as society. It would have been truer if she had said that there was no such thing as the economy.

It is almost impossible, in this nation, to pass a day without hearing the phrase ‘the economy’ spill from someone’s lips. There is no need to ask what it means. Its significance is taken to be self-evident. Our ferociously sceptical political interviewers – who in so many respects keep our politicians honest – rarely extend their scepticism to this term. Rather, this phrase, ‘the economy’, more often serves as an obvious lowest common denominator, a given from which debate and argument can proceed, but which need not itself be called into question. ‘What good is x [opera, poetry, social science] to the economy’?

To know the answers to that question, though, we should need to know what the economy might be. This, however, is no easy matter.

A recent book, The Human Economy, edited by the eminent anthropologist Keith Hart and others, indicates why. Hart and his colleagues understand how human exchange works by actually looking at the facts – what we can call the anthropology of exchange. They are the inheritors of Marcel Mauss’s classic study The Gift: the form and reason for exchange, and Hart’s own scarcely less classic lecture, ‘Two sides of the coin’.

One way of expressing one central insight of that tradition is this. It is easy to think that ‘politics’ and ‘economics’ just are separate matters. When I buy a loaf of bread in a supermarket, I don’t expect my voting preferences, status as a citizen, or anything of that kind, to have any effect on the price. Nor do I expect to have to get to know the person who’s working the till in order to come away with my loaf.

But that’s only part of the story. The checkout situation in fact relies on a whole unspoken political background. I trust that regulations are in place which make sure that the loaf of bread I am buying is not full of chalk, or arsenic. The stamp on the coin I pay for the bread with is a political sign. It shows that the coin is legal tender. There is a name for the place where this trust is abused: Switzerland.

The Human Economy assumes that understanding the economy also means understanding the polities without which there could be no exchanges of this kind. But that isn’t the sense that’s usually assumed when the phrase ‘the economy’ is casually dropped into our earlobes at around 8.10am. The sense which is usually working at that point is a fantasy of sheer wealth, disembedded from all the human labour, institutions and experiences which alone make anything valuable. ‘The economy’ in this sense is a vast and fantastic superstition – yet one which we are daily encouraged to live by. It is a global cult, and every ‘serious politician’ has drunk the Kool-Aid. It is not more credible than parthenogenesis, just more miserable.

It is not the job of a university to ‘contribute to the economy’. It is the job of a university to educate the nation. The nation urgently needs to know how living individual men and women actually do make exchanges, give gifts, make loans, and so on, rather than being fed meccano models of ‘the economy’.

The political elites do not want to hear it. And one of the ways in which they can put their fingers in their ears is to attempt to extend their reach through every aspect of public culture. ‘Audit’ is one name for this reach, and over the last thirty years, every aspect of what scholars do has become more and more subject to audit – and that is to say, too often, to the presumption that the yardstick of cultural value is to be ‘the economy’ in the fantasised sense mentioned above.

Nor is that all. As audit sucks all prestige into itself, more and more scholars have liked to think of themselves as auditors and managers. So they will carry out ‘strategic reviews’ on each other, as though a university were an army; they will inquire about ‘the delivery of the curriculum’, as though the latter were a quantity of top-grade baked beans waiting to be forked into the mouths of supine undergraduates; they will suggest that lectures might just as well be podcasts.

This fatally weakens the solidarity which universities could show in the face of what is a calculated ideological assault on one of the public institutions able to pipe up about the crevasse towards which our society is heading.

One way to repair that solidarity is to insist upon the democratic structures of self-governance which are still, residually, in place in some of our universities. A small beginning was made in that direction last week.

Simon Jarvis is the Gorley Putt Professor of Poetry and Poetics in the Faculty of English, university of Cambridge. He was a signatory of the academic declaration of support for the recent student occupation.