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Elie Halévy essentially expressed the view recorded by James Mill in his anonymously written ‘On the Nature, Measures, and Causes of Value’⁷ that the first chapter of the Critical Dissertation relating to the nature of value ‘contains not an assertion, who which, as far as ideas politico-economical are concerned, Mr. Ricardo would not have assented; it contains, not indeed, as far as such ideas are concerned, an assertion which is not implied in the propositions which Mr. Ricardo has put forth. It is a criticism on some of Mr. Ricardo's forms of expression…’ ([J. Mill], 1826a, p. 157). The justification for the Ricardian reaction is clear enough, as I shall now show.⁸

The “theory” in the distinctive sociological theory of C. Wright Mills is this: American society was increasingly “postmodern,” by which he meant a society devoid of reason and freedom as practical features of everyday life and thus a societal formation fundamentally severed from the aims and optimism of The Enlightenment (Mills, 1959b, p. 13, p. 166, also 1959a). With Max Weber and John Dewey principally in mind, but also upon the benefit of his study of Marx and the Frankfurt School, Mills argued that “rationality without reason” was coming to dominate lived experience (see Dandaneau, 2001, 2006, 2007).