2 SOCIAL SCIENTIST The consolidation of the varna system and the stratification it involved, was ensured by an ideology that held that it was divine in origin, fixed and universal. Occupations had to be hereditary as function and aptitude are determined by birth and these stand in a hierarchical relation sanctified by religion. Suvira Jaiswal argues that the varna system and its ideology were not priestly inventions but an expression of the dominant material relationships prevailing in society. Not surprisingly, the ideology pervaded even the Buddhist and the Jain world-views, with the difference that these religions contested the hierarchical position and the higher ritual status of the brahmanas above the kshatriyas. The varna ideology helped in securing the structured dependence of the landless labour in the form of untouchables or the so-called menial castes and sustained the nexus of jajmani relationship built around the landowner in a petty mode of production.' However, while maintaining its static appearance due to its religious colouring, the varw ideology, from time to time, has made adjustments in those spheres where it was in conflict with the material reality. It is this facet which has given it the strength to remain a material force, a formidable impediment to progress. The next article in this issue presents the views of an influential trend of Marxist thinking in the U.S., which challenges conceptions based on the existence and unity of economics as a discipline. Based on an analysis of the epistemological, methodological and entry-point differences among neoclassical, Keynesian and Marxian schools of thought, the authors (Amariglio, Resnick and Wolff) argue that economics is better seen as a field comprising radically different and competing discourses and that as far as these discourses themselves are concerned, there is more in common between, say, Marxian economic and literary theory, than among Marxian, neoclassical and Keynesian economic theories. Yet, if protagonists of any one discourse seek to define a discipline within which they operate, it is because they use their method as a means of domination and exclusion and marginalisation of other discourses.