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Until recently, St. Thomas More's Utopia generally had been regarded as a serious work of social criticism and the expression of his social ideal, although there are widely differing views of More's specific intent in writing it. As many have argued, Utopia addresses a crucial politico/economic question: what is the best way of life? Historians of economic thought in particular have taken the work at face value and, with few exceptions, have given it short shrift. Other scholars within the humanities have examined it more seriously and at greater length, a few even raising the question of possible ironic or satirical intent, given that irony was one of More's characteristic rhetorical devices. Gerard Wegemer's recent interpretation that More's main purpose in writing Utopia was ironic places major emphasis on the element of irony that pervades the work. This article adds economic arguments to existing literary and biographical ones to buttress this assessment that Utopia is an irony, written to undercut rather than to advance the idealization of a communist social order.

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This paper examines Friedrich von Wieser's theory of the socialist or communist planned economy. It identifies in Wieser's Law of Power (1926) the abiding interests that stimulated his attempt to use Carl Menger's theory of subjective value to present a theory of socialism, first in Natural Value (1889) & later in Social Economics (1914). It discusses his conception of a unit of marginal utility, or "natural value," as the basic unit of economic calculation in his imputation theory & his use of that building block in his consequent theory of production & distribution in a socialist economy. Lastly, it argues that Wieser's theory attempts to socially objectify subjective values & is actually a return to a pre-Mengerian supply-side, real cost approach to the theory of value. Wieser's theory of economic calculation under socialism thus represents a failure to understand the radical contribution of Menger's value theory to the theory of exchange. References. Adapted from the source document.