ABSTRACT
The policy advice Western governments, international agencies and economists have offered the Central and Eastern European economies attempting to make the transition from central planning to reliance on market mechanisms has been almost exclusively based on neoclassical economic theory. This is an unfortunate situation. Neoclassical economic theory is singularly ill-equipped to understand and give advice on the issues economies and societies undergoing radical transformation face.1 As many of the papers of this conference attest, it is to the 'Worldly Philosophers', those economists who looked at the economy in its historical and social context, that we should turn, not to the self-attested marginalist theorists.
