ABSTRACT
Neo-classical economics takes as its starting point the individual 'producerconsumer' who consumes directly the products of his own activity and whose activity involves him in relation only with physically defined factors and not with a world of individuals upon which he must depend. The significance of this condition is that production on the part of the autonomous individual involves no explicit social conditions. The economic system as a whole is reducible to the individual producer-consumer and the latter stands immediately for the totality of economic life. As indicated in chapter 6, this standpoint places intractable obstacles in the path of the emergence of a concept of the economic system as a whole, and, in so doing establishes what we have argued is the key problem of neo-classical analysis: the market system must be derived without independent determination, as the product of whim it must remain arbitrary and ungrounded - the surface expression of a reality which is indifferent to it.
