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The paper argues that the mathematisation of economics between the 1930s and the 1960s was propelled by the political tensions in Europe. My claim is that quantitative methods grew in importance during the period because they were perceived as politically neutraland therefore able to orient public policies by eschewing ideological charges. Moreover, I provide an empirical account of the changing nature of economics using Latent Semantic Analysis. It is shown that between 1933 and 1967 there was a shift from divergence of ideas to convergence of beliefs such that in the 1960s the language used by the top journals of economics had become considerably more homogeneous. Not only the top journals became more similar throughout the period, but also the papers published inthese journals became more alike. The evidence suggests that by the mid-1960s the main journals of economics had converged to a paradigmatic core.