A gulf profound as that Serbonian bog Betwixt Damiata and Mount Casius old Where armies whole have sunk This quote of Milton preceded the chapter on non-convexities in Arrow & Hahn's General Competitive Analysis (1971) the standard graduate text used in the seventies. [Hahn & Hart taught from it in Cambridge in the late 70s]. Then A&H proceded in showing how limited non-convexities can be accomodated in a GE framework. Relaxing of other assumptions of the A-D model ensued. Hahn once remarked that "we proceded with a pace of a theorem a day". The testing of the robustness of the A-D edifice has indeed been tested [The section [17E] of Mas-Colell et al. 1995 on the Sonnenschein-Mantel-Debreu theorem is entitled "anything goes"]. The Great Temple has been replaced by a beehive of family shrines. There is no doubt that neoclassical theory [it is called economic theory these days, methinks] has a very active research programme. And yes, constraints are not always exogenous. Indeed, the very essence of the agent-principal model is the way the principal sets the agent's contraints. Even in the original Walrasian model the constraints of the initial endowments, are transformed through the preferences of the individuals and the market mechanism [crieur, tatonnement, hic est corpus] to prices that form the budget constraint for each consumer/trader. And the model does have a certain undeniable mathematical allure."Justice is a cube, said the old sage" [FYE]. The problem is not the use of mathematics, or that of mathematical formalisation. The problem is rather, that this is considered to be the sole acceptable method of addressing problems. In a sense, from a rigorous methodological standpoint microeconomics should be the only acceptable type of economics. [representative agent, warts and all]. Relevance has to be sacrificed in order to achieve mathematical tractability. It is one thing to have a frictionless model in physics, and another thing to have a frictionless model of walking, John Cleese notwithstanding. It is like looking for your keys where the light is and not where you lost them. If there is light there, so much the better. The off-the-mark remark about the closet hetero Italo-Cantabrigians secretly yearning for a revival of the old Capital controversies will keep me amused for the next week during which I intend to re-read Norman Cohn's exhilarating _In pursuit of the millennium_ in my summer vacation. Have a nice summer. Nicholas J. Theocarakis