The work of Poland’s Oskar Lange is a vital antidote to the dominant approach of twenty-first-century economics, in which economists, divided by doctrines and methodologies, operate in siloed communities of shared assumptions and data. This framework insulates the standard thinking in each community from the critical input of those who do not share its dogmas, while exaggerating the significance of the data on which that school grazes.

Lange’s intellectual legacy challenges the distinction between the mostly neoclassical field of mainstream economics and that of Marxism. He insisted that Marxism needed the neoclassical insights of Léon Walras to complete Karl Marx’s economic theory, and made outstanding contributions to neoclassical welfare economics and the economics of information that now form essential parts of both neoclassical and New Keynesian economic traditions.

For Lange, this scholarship was not meant to complete an academic project. It had the revolutionary purpose of showing how, in the twentieth century, capitalism had reached a dead end, and the only way forward was to socialism.