This book presents the history of economic thought as it relates to today’s most pressing problems, and it emphasizes the critical connection that exists between what may seem cold, unrealistic mathematical economic models, and the quality of everyday life of any citizen of the planet earth....

This paper discusses the relation between law and contingency in the formation of value. It begins from a much-ignored assertion of Marx, repeated throughout his works, that the equality of supply and demand is contingent and their non-equality constitutes their law. This highly complex and...

Right-wing critics of Keynes have often suggested that he was a socialist. His policy proposals were very often described as a slippery slope that would lead society into a totalitarian nightmare. Alternatively, from the left, Keynes was often seen as a reformist that intended to preserve the...

Anarchism has been rejected by modern science as an antihistorical and utopian concept. Even Kropotkin, who sought to provide scientific justification for anarchist views, in fact professed the ideology of the "Golden Age", according to which the idyll of collaboration, which had taken place...

This is a pre-publication version of a full-length review of Kuhn, R. (2007) Henryk Grossman and the Recovery of Marxism. Urbana and U of Illinois. Please cite as Freeman, A. 2008. ‘The Discontents of Marxism’. Debatte, 16 (1), April 2008 pp. 122-131

This paper was produced as a study aid, to help people understand twentieth-century debates about Marx’s theory of the profit rate. It discusses and dissects the principal criticisms of Marx’s formulation of the ‘law of the tendential fall in the profit rate’. It is I think one of the...

This paper was submitted to the 2001 conference of the International Working Group on Value Theory at the Eastern Economic Association. It was an initial short response to the idea, which has become common amongst Simultaneoust Marxist Economists, that in Marx’s theory, equilibrium or...

Eduard Bernstein’s proposals for revising marxist theory burst like a thunderclap on the late 19th century workers’ movement, and in particular on the German social democracy. Here was the militant who had suffered 20 years of exile, whose editorship of the party newspaper had made it such a...

This paper was presented in Amsterdam at an international seminar on Ernest Mandel's legacy. It was not included in the published edited volume arising from that gathering because the editor sought the removal of references to Ernest's views on the processes at work in Russia and Eastern Europe,...

This paper is about a nineteenth-century debate about causality – but, unusually, we emphasise what was not said, and those who did not take part. We begin by recapitulating the debate on so-called statistical fatalism, precipitated by the discovery of dependable regularities in such social...