ABSTRACT
The value-construct envisaged a society where people were all subject in economic matters to the same laws, and where these laws were mainly concerned to prohibit force and fraud in their dealings with each other. The conceptual elegance and austerity which resulted became strikingly evident when the value-construct was given mathematical expression as a system of simultaneous equations. In the type of economic society which the value-construct envisages, it is of course the market which makes possible some approach to a pre-reconciled solution. The value-construct, being a work of theory and an abstraction, was selective. The value-construct edifies reason into a claim to represent the whole. The paradoxical human mind can see in the one scheme of things where we are placed, on one hand time, novelty, uncertainty, the three strands of consciousness itself, inseparably spun together; and on the other hand, pervasive ostensible consistency, the pre-condition of reason.
