ABSTRACT
A hundred years earlier (in 1874-7) a Frenchman, Léon Walras, produced ‘the biggest utopian dream of them all’,3 a phenomenological insight into the mechanism of a ‘perfectly competitive system’. Contrary to its later interpretation, this was not intended as a description of the reality of capitalist economics: nevertheless, as all successful explorations of a pure, necessary essence of a historically contingent phenomenon, it was an effort to capture the inherent potential, the overwhelming tendencies, the developmental horizons of the economic system which, in fits and starts, was coming of age throughout the nineteenth century. Reality from this perspective appeared as an imperfect, still distorted or immature, rendition of a perfectly equilibrated, self-perpetuating system kept on course by the combination of perfect mobility of resources, perfect flexibility of prices, and perfect accessibility of information. Reality could be measured against this ideal; departures from the ideal were contingent and, in principle, reparable; a real economy tended (and could be assisted in this tendency by properly designed policies) towards the ideal which at the same time constituted its true essence and its constantly present potential.
