[go: up one dir, main page]
IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/b/mtp/titles/0262612240.html
   My bibliography  Save this book

By Force of Thought: Irregular Memoirs of an Intellectual Journey

Author

Listed:
  • Janos Kornai

    (Collegium Budapest)

Abstract
Janos Kornai, a distinguished Hungarian economist, began his adult life as an ardent believer in socialism and then became a critic of the communist political and economic system. He lost family members in the Holocaust, contributed to the ideological preparation for the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, and became an influential theorist of the post-Soviet economic transition. He has been a journalist, a researcher prohibited from teaching in his home country, and a tenured professor at Harvard. By Force of Thought traces Kornai's lifelong intellectual journey and offers a subjective complement to his academic research. Disenchanted with communism, Kornai published Overcentralization (1956), the first book written by someone living behind the Iron Curtain to be openly critical of Soviet-style economics. Although it was attacked in Hungary, it was hailed by Western economists. The Kornai-Lipták theory on two-level planning captured the attention of mathematical economists. Kornai went on to publish the controversial Anti-Equilibrium (1971), a critique of the general equilibrium theory underpinning mainstream economic analyses of markets, Economics of Shortage (1980), The Road to a Free Economy (1990), and the summary of his lifetime research, The Socialist System (1992). An intellectual emissary between East and West, Kornai commuted between Harvard and Budapest for many years. Kornai's memoir describes his research—including his present-day evaluation of his past work—as well as the social and political environments in which he did his work. The difficulties faced by a critic of central planning in a communist country are made especially vivid by material from newly opened secret police files and informers' reports on his activities. By Force of Thought will be an essential resource for students of economic thought, socialist systems, and postsocialist transition, and for readers interested in Eastern European intellectual life before, during, and after communism.

Suggested Citation

  • Janos Kornai, 2008. "By Force of Thought: Irregular Memoirs of an Intellectual Journey," MIT Press Books, The MIT Press, edition 1, volume 1, number 0262612240, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:mtp:titles:0262612240
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Csaba, László, 2011. "Milyen a jó közgazdaságtan? Töprengések Wagener könyve kapcsán. Hans-Jürgen Wagener: Wirtschaftsordnung im Wandel. Zur Transformation, 1985-2010. Metropolis Verlag, Marburg, 2011, 286 o [What is go," Közgazdasági Szemle (Economic Review - monthly of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences), Közgazdasági Szemle Alapítvány (Economic Review Foundation), vol. 0(5), pages 477-482.
    2. Chenggang Xu, 2017. "Capitalism and Socialism: A Review of Kornai's Dynamism, Rivalry, and the Surplus Economy," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 55(1), pages 191-208, March.
    3. Jozsef Moczar, 2017. "Arrow-Debreu Model versus Kornai-critique," Athens Journal of Business & Economics, Athens Institute for Education and Research (ATINER), vol. 3(2), pages 143-170, April.
    4. Gérard Roland, 2021. "János Kornai (1928–2021): One of the Intellectual Giants of the Twentieth Century," Comparative Economic Studies, Palgrave Macmillan;Association for Comparative Economic Studies, vol. 63(4), pages 674-678, December.
    5. J. Barkley Rosser Jr & Richard P.F. Holt & David Colander, 2010. "European Economics at a Crossroads," Books, Edward Elgar Publishing, number 13585.
    6. Barbara Dluhosch, 2011. "European Economics at a Crossroads, by J. Barkley Rosser, Jr., Richard P. F. Holt, and David Colander," Journal of Regional Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 51(3), pages 629-631, August.
    7. Libora Oates-Indruchová, 2008. "The Limits of Thought?: The Regulatory Framework of Social Sciences and Humanities in Czechoslovakia (1968–1989)," Europe-Asia Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 60(10), pages 1767-1782.
    8. Juan Carlos de Pablo, 2009. "¿Qué significa ser economista en argentina?," CEMA Working Papers: Serie Documentos de Trabajo. 410, Universidad del CEMA.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Janos Kornai; socialism; postsocialist transition;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • A31 - General Economics and Teaching - - Multisubject Collective Works - - - Multisubject Collected Writings of Individuals
    • B31 - Schools of Economic Thought and Methodology - - History of Economic Thought: Individuals - - - Individuals
    • P20 - Political Economy and Comparative Economic Systems - - Socialist and Transition Economies - - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:mtp:titles:0262612240. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kristin Waites (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://mitpress.mit.edu .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.