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Introduction. This article is an analysis of the factors of the emergence and development of economic hermeneutics. The stereotypical ideas about the total ideological unification of political economy in the USSR during the period of Soviet Marxism dominance and the ideological neutrality of neoclassical synthesis, the mainstream of Western economic science, are being critically rethought. Theoretical analysis. It is shown that Soviet political economy is a very interesting complex special case of the economic knowledge development, which was subject to specific requirements from the state apparatus (power structures). The conditions for the genesis of economic hermeneutics in the West within the framework of the neo-Austrian school of economics as a possible reaction to the dogmatism of the neoclassical mainstream are briefly considered. The general reasons for the conservatism of the scientific environment are investigated. An assumption is made about the presence of a number of similar features between Marxism and the neoclassical theory. Results. It has been established that the dominance of Marxism in the USSR and the formal neoclassical synthesis in the USA made it possible to form an environment that subsequently led to a new scientific direction – economic hermeneutics. Moreover, the process of the emergence of a new scientific direction in the depths of this conservative economic paradigm was quite natural, since economic theory is hermeneutic in nature – it seeks to interpret the meaning of outwardly simple, but vital phenomena. The materials of the article can be used to teach the history of economic thought.