----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- Are we making a distrinction between the idea that economic laws are historically relative and the more specific issue about 'terms'? The idea that economic laws are historically relative is certainly older. Adam Smith, e.g., thought that the labor theory of value applied to an 'early and rude' state of society, for example, but not to later societies in which capital goods had become "accumulated in the hands of specific persons" and land became private property, and both became more generalized and significant parts of production processes. Mat Forstater ------------ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ------------ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]