ABSTRACT
What role does competition play in modern capitalism? This is the question to which this chapter is addressed and few would doubt that it is one of the central questions in economic analysis. But if it is so central surely the answer will have been settled long ago in the development of the economics discipline. However, this is not so, competing ideas about the nature of competition remain unresolved and lie at the heart of the divergence between different views of the economic process and the best way to think of its modus operandi.
