economy. Vocational schools that teach general concepts and flexibility, not job-specific skills. "Illusions of necessity in the economic order" Unger's first writing on economic theory was the article "Illusions of necessity in the economic order" in the May 1978 issue of American Economic Review. In the article he makes a case for the need of contemporary economic thought to imitate classical political economy in which theories of exchange should be incorporated into theories of power and perception. The article articulates the problem of the American economy as one of the inability to realize democracy of production and community in the workplace. This failure, according to Unger, is the result of the lack of a comprehensive program that encompasses production, society, and state, so that immediate attempts to address inequality get swallowed up and appropriated by the status quo in the course of winning immediate gains for the organization or constituency, e.g. unions. To realize a democracy in the workplace and the abolition of wealth and poverty, Unger argues for the need to relate the program of worker community and democracy with an enlargement of democracy at the national level—the goal cannot be only one of economic production and worker's rights, but must be accompanied by a national project at the structural level. He pushes this idea further by calling not just for a restructuring of the relationship between the firm and state based on private property, but that it also has to be replaced with a new set of rights encompassing access to jobs, markets, and capital. Only as private rights are phased out can rights of decentralized decision making and market exchange be extended to workers. This needs to be accompanied by limits on the size of enterprise and how profits are used to control others' labor. Neoclassical economics is not up to this task because it begins with preconceived standards that it applies to explain empirical data, while leaving out that which is a theoretical anomaly; there is no causal basis of analysis, Unger says, rather everything is embedded in a timeless universal without any account for context. Furthermore, the ambiguity of concepts of maximization, efficiency, and rationalization pin the analysis to a certain notion of the behavior of the rationalizing individual, making the analysis either tautological or reduced to a set of power relations translated into the language of material exchange. Programmatic thought Key in Unger's thinking