94 SOCIAL SCIENTIST The mystique of closed political systems has for the present been dispensed with. As a natural corollary, liberalisation has displaced development as the central issue in economic literature. Prabhat Patnaik's hitherto-near-dissociated themes have converged. Since the State is under attack, propositions once regarded as incontrovertible have again to go through the ringer. It is impossible to erode the analytical integrity an ideologue lays claim to. Only his focus shifts— to new and yet essentially classical issues: the instruments of exploitation likely to be deployed by international finance capital in the new situation, the morphology of the movable capital that is likely to penetrate in to the developing economies, the pre-conditionalities it is to insist upon, the linkages it will establish with domestic categories for strengthening its position, and so on. These are no longer constituents of a distant thunder, but part of our everyday menu. In the later essays included in the volume, Prabhat Patnaik immerses himself in to some of the acutely contemporary issues just referred to. He never for a moment deviates from the analytical rigour his economics is known and respected for. He has, besides, a way of putting apparently obtuse concepts and ideas across with effortless simplicity. The sparkling elegance of his style induces one to go back and re-read, for sheer intellectual delight, a paragraph or paragraphs one has negotiated only a while ago. The pleasure derivable from this book therefore deserves to be separately mentioned from the insight it provides to several intriguing questions of the day. If the present reviewer has still some misgivings, it is because of the unfinished components of an immensely rich work-in-progress. Patnaik skips discussing a particular issue, but it mu t be very much in his mind. The factors responsible for gifting capitalism and imperialism their second incarnation cannot be analysed with any precision without a simultaneous analysis of the developments within which contributed to the debacle of socialism in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Such an analysis is called for not only on account the necessity to carry forward the objectivity of Marxist-Leninist scholastic tradition. A study of this nature is equally relevant in a more narrow context, to wit, for understanding the pre-conditionalities for reassembling the framework of self-reliant growth in Third World economies. The obiter dicta, much publicised of late, on the supposed non-workability of command economic systems deserves to be examined at some depth. An ideologue must have his answers ready to all types of questions, including even to questions that are prima facie not addressed to the issues that are germane. Why socialism, and along with it, collectivist economic planning, came to a sorry end, even if it be temporarily, in the first country of the Revolution after long years-of-experimentation is a question that needs to be squarely faced. The answer to this question cannot be left to the prejudices of free market-loving economists. The