On the very day that I received my assignment from the Social Text editors to write on "Theory" for the one-hundredth issue of the journal, formal Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan appeared at a hearing of the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform to discuss the current world financial crisis. Pressing him to consider whether his strenuous advocacy of free-market principles during his eighteen-year tenure at the Fed had been misguided and had contributed to the financial meltdown, committee chair Henry Waxman (D-CA) asked Greenspan directly, "Do you feel that your ideology pushed you to make decisions that you wish you had not made?" Greenspan's response was at once coy and pedagogical: "Well, remember that what an ideology is, is a conceptual framework [for] the way people deal with reality. Everyone has one. You have to -- to exist, you need an ideology. The question is whether it is accurate or not."