By Force of Thought: Irregular Memoirs of an Intellectual Journey
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Manufacturer: The MIT Press
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Average Customer Rating: 
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 330
EAN: 9780262612241
ISBN: 0262612240
Label: The MIT Press
Manufacturer: The MIT Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 488
Publication Date: 2008-10-31
Publisher: The MIT Press
Studio: The MIT Press
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Editorial Reviews:
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Winner, 2007 AAASS Ed A. Hewett Book Prize given by the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS)
János 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.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: The Other Side of the Coin
Comment: A serious and personal look at economics from the other side of the coin of our own system (socialist) -- and a great way in modern times to look at one person's evolution and critical thinking. It is easy to read books that you agree with ; easy to dismiss those that take positions you don't. Rarest of all to read the evolution of a person's view that moves across the chasm of such divergent views, from Marxism and then away from it, and does so in such difficult, honest terms. This is a story of ideas, and the influence they have on multiple levels.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Forceful
Comment: Highly recommended for those interested in the study of economics and ethics. Also for all those who may be interested in how one very bright person made a significant difference in the dark years between the Nazis and the fall of the Berlin Wall, while living under a political regime (Hungary) inspired by Karl Marx.
This is not a warm personal history, but a strict look back on a serious life's work. Dr. Kornai is a person I had never heard of prior to reading his book--- but one whom I now greatly respect.
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