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Marx's formulation of the alienation problematic is grounded in a strategic set of underlying assumptions concerning the human condition. On the one hand, people are seen as the creators of their material and mental world through their labour activity. They are endowed with natural human qualities, creative powers and historically existing potentialities that are essential to human growth. People are, in essence, free, creative, productive beings of praxis in conscious control of their activities and the world they have created. But the material and mental products of human labour (e.g. commodities, ideas, social institutions) assume an autonomous life of their own. They come to rule over people as dehumanizing objects and powers, as alien and hostile forces operating independently above and against the common will of their own creators. People no longer experience themselves as active human agents in conscious control of their life circumstances. Their own productive activities, human creations, social relationships and nature at large remain alien and beyond their grasp. The realization of natural human capacities and potentialities for a genuinely human life in an alienating world of domination and oppression is consequently thwarted, repressed or denied. Alienation is construed as a universal social phenomenon that pervades all spheres of human life in the existing world.

Introduction Economics has been defined and re‐defined several times in the past, and even within the dominant scientific orientation of the discipline, there are currently a number of alternative definitions. One of the definitions, which has been gaining increasing popularity in recent years is “economics as the science of choices.” This definition focuses on the fundamental objective of the discipline as currently formulated, namely, the optimum allocation of resources through appropriate choices, or in other words, the development of economic engineering based on science. We will use the concept of choices as the convenient point of entry into the exploration of the nature of economic reality, or its ontology.

In a recent essay entitled “Value‐relevant Sociology”, David Gray (1983:405–416) argues that if sociology has to be socially relevant, “it is essential that sociology becomes consciously value‐relevant, not value‐free.” He maintains that sociologists cannot analyse the consequences of social structure, forces, and change in a value‐free context if their works are to be relevant for social policies. He then goes on to say, “Between the extremes of value‐free, non‐relevant, sometimes trivial, sociology on the one hand, and immediate response to pressing socioeconomic problems and prevailing political winds on the other, where does the significant sociology lie?” (1983:406). For Gray, both extremes are inappropriate for a worthy academic discipline.

Professor Boris Ischboldin has devoted a lifetime of productive scholarship to economic science. By virtue of his native gifts and a highly cultured background he has attained to a breadth of scholarship which is reminiscent of that giant of modern economics, Joseph Schumpeter. Ischboldin's linguistic skills have enabled him to acquire an uncommon familiarity with the works of economists that is truly international in scope, and that is one factor which prompts me to compare him with Schumpeter. Among the results of his efforts are an approach to, or school of, economics which he chooses to call the School of Economic Synthesis. It involves, among other things, a synthesis of various approaches to analysing economic realities—approaches whose various practitioners often tended to regard their own as the one correct and only legitimate method. In less skillful hands, or perhaps because of less charitable hearts, diversity often resulted in a kind of tension that was not always creative, as well as a mutual exclusiveness and even scholastic in‐tolerance which put an unneeded burden on the progress of the science. With Professor Ischboldin and the co‐founder of the School of Economic Synthesis, Arthur Spiethoff, variety became instead the basis for complementary creativity! Thus, such disparate figures as David Ricardo and Wesley Mitchell, or Leon Walras and John Commons find themselves embraced into a single schema that Ischboldin calls, “a theory of economic laws and methodology”.

I. Introduction On January 1, 1986, Mikhail Gorbachev, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), who has been described by Andrei Gromyko as a man who “has a nice smile, but he has iron teeth,” (Goldman, 1) gave an address to the people of the United States in which he informed them that the “Soviet people are dedicated to peace — that supreme value equal to the gift of life.” (Gorbachev, 1986(a),5). Gorbachev appealed to all that is good in the American people when he said: