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Since its inception as a separate discipline at the beginnings of the industrial age, economics focused on mechanisms of production and exchange of commodities (capital and consumption goods). This commodity production activity was represented as drawing upon an external (environmental) domain — the land and water and, more generally, nature — that furnished energy, raw materials and waste disposal services. Subsequently, it was admitted that there were “environmental costs” associated with the economic commodity production.

One of the central problems of economic theory is the whole question of the inter-relations of the commodity production system and the price system in capitalist economies, and the resulting distribution of profits and wages. A particularly powerful general solution of this problem was published by Sraffa in 1960 — a solution that has in part resuscitated an interest in the classical labour theory of value. At the same time, there exists in geography and regional science a long tradition of land use and land rent analysis generally derivative out of the writings of Von Thunen in the early nineteenth century. This tradition, however, has fairly consistently overlooked precisely the problems of production, pricing and distribution, and has largely been content to show how land use and land rent patterns emerge once these problems have been somehow largely assumed away.

“Thomas Hobbes was born in 1588 and lived till 1679. His life thus extends from the defeat of the Spanish Armada to the beginning of the Popish Plot; from the year in which the independence of Protestant England was finally ensured to the period when the threat to restore Catholicism in England was less a political reality than the stunt of a Parliamentary party. The revolution of 1640 occurred after Hobbes was 50 years old, when his main ideas had taken form.”1

“Up to the 1914–16 war,” said Lenin, “Karl Kautsky was a Marxist, and many of his major writings and statements will always remain models of Marxism.”1 But from that time forward, Lenin vehemently attacked “The Renegade Kautsky.”2 His “disgraceful rubbish, childish babble and shallowest opportunism impel me to ask: Why do we do nothing to fight the theoretical vulgarisation of Marxism by Kautsky?” Furthermore, and I reproduce Lenin’s comments exactly

Contemporary alienation theory begins with Hegel, although the history of modern conceptions of estrangement begins before Hegel with the struggle of the mechanical materialism of the French Enlightenment against feudal alienation.1 Nevertheless, alienation and estrangement theory has been directed against Hegel, although from two opposed outlooks, which reflect the philosophical rivalry between materialism and idealism.