ABSTRACT
Confrontation of traditional economic doctrine with the actual course of events in the modern industrial societies of the West has forced to acknowledge a widening rift between theory and observations. Adam Smith speaks of the market price of any commodity as "continually gravitating, if one may say so, toward the natural price". In a free market system the partners in exchange are to regard one another as "data" inaccessible to mutual influence, though each partner is supposed to know about the others all he needs to know for his own behavior to interlock. The rules of organization, from which the theory of the market is abstracted, can only be "rules of Tightness". The design of an equilibrating market is seen as "built into" the unwittingly performed actions of the individual marketers.
