Log In
Or create an account ->
Imperial Library
Home
About
News
Upload
Forum
Help
Login/SignUp
Index
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Foreword to the English-language edition (1972)
I. The Theme
The Starting Point
The Rationality of Economic Systems: A Question of Ideology or a Scientific Problem?
Rationality of agents and rationality of systems
A formal and a material definition of the economy
Two ideological answers to the problem: Adam Smith and Oskar Lange
Economic rationality and the rationality of economic science
Subject-matter and theoretical conditions of this inquiry
Capitalist Economic Rationality
The rational entrepreneur
The rational worker
The rational consumer
Rationality of the capitalist system
Perfect competition: equilibrium; Pareto optimum; welfare
The duality theorem and the innocence of mathematics
The role of supply and demand in the Marxist theory of value and prices
Two conceptions of contradiction in Capital
‘Necessity and superiority’ of socialism: science, ideology, humanism
The fundamental difference between Hegel’s dialectic and Marx’s
The conceptions of correspondence and of hierarchy of structures
The Distance Covered
II. The Rationality of Economic Theory
1. Political Economy and Philosophy
Where had Marx got to in 1843?
What Paris gave Marx
The 1844 Manuscripts: is Marx already a Marxist?
The alliance with Engels: The Holy Family
2. The Structures of the Method of Capital
i. The hypothetico-deductive method
The use of assumptions
The deductive operations
ii. The dialectical method
The object of the dialectic
iii. The dialectic as an operational field
Use of the dialectical method in Capital
(1) The study of the process of the circulation of capital
(2) Capital is not a ‘thing’ at rest but a reality in movement
(3) The specific role of the circuit of productive capital
(4) The basis of the system’s dynamic
(5) Relations between economic theory and historical reality
(6) Relations between economic theory and historical science
iv. The external contradiction of capitalism
v. The internal contradiction of capitalism and the fundamental laws of the dynamic of the system
vi. Conclusion. The method of Capital as a synthetic unity of the two methods
The dialectical method
The hypothetico-deductive method
The linking and synthesis of the two methods
Notes on the simplifying assumptions
3. Some Aspects of the Method of Capital
4. The Measurement of Value: a Problem of Optimum Management in a Socialist Economy
5. The Marginalist and the Marxist Theories of Value and Prices: Some Hypotheses
III. The Rationality of Economic Systems
The Object and Method of Economic Anthropology
1. The idea of an economic system and analysis of its working
The domain of the ‘economic’
The idea of a ‘system’
The laws of the functioning of a system
The formal model of a possible economic system
The structures of production
The structures of distribution
The structures of consumption
2. The problem of a ‘general theory’ and of the right to ‘extend’ the categories and laws of political economy
3. Towards a renovation of the idea of ‘economic rationality’
Index
← Prev
Back
Next →
← Prev
Back
Next →