Results by title

343 books match the query 'Capitalism' and 22 start with s

cover of Scripted Affects, Branded Selves: Television, Subjectivity, and Capitalism in 1990s Japan

Scripted Affects, Branded Selves

Television, Subjectivity, and Capitalism in 1990s Japan

Gabriella Lukács

Duke University Press, 2010

In Scripted Affects, Branded Selves, Gabriella Lukács analyzes the development of a new primetime serial called “trendy drama” as the Japanese television industry’s ingenious response to market fragmentation. Much like the HBO hit Sex and the City, trendy dramas feature well-heeled young sophisticates enjoying consumer-oriented lifestyles while managing their unruly love lives. Integrating a political-economic analysis of television production with reception research, Lukács suggests that the trendy drama marked a shift in the Japanese television industry from offering story-driven entertainment to producing lifestyle-oriented programming. She interprets the new televisual preoccupation with consumer trends not as a sign of the medium’s downfall, but as a savvy strategy to appeal to viewers who increasingly demand entertainment that feels more personal than mass-produced fare. After all, what the producers of trendy dramas realized in the late 1980s was that taste and lifestyle were sources of identification that could be manipulated to satisfy mass and niche demands more easily than could conventional marketing criteria such as generation or gender. Lukács argues that by capitalizing on the semantic fluidity of the notion of lifestyle, commercial television networks were capable of uniting viewers into new affective alliances that, in turn, helped them bury anxieties over changing class relations in the wake of the prolonged economic recession.
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cover of Seeking the Best Master: State Ownership in the Varieties of Capitalism

Seeking the Best Master

State Ownership in the Varieties of Capitalism

Miklós Szanyi

Central European University Press, 2020

The economic crisis of 2008–2009 signaled the end of the Post-Washington Consensus on restricting the role of the state in economic and development policy. Since then, state ownership and state intervention have increased worldwide. This volume offers a comparative analysis of the evolution of direct state intervention in the economy through state-owned companies in Austria, Brazil, France, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Turkey, Singapore, and Slovenia. Each case study includes substantial explanations of historical, cultural, and institutional contexts. All the contributors point to the complex nature of the current revival in state economic interventions. The few models that are successful cannot hide the potential problems of excessive state intervention, linked to high levels of moral hazard. State-owned enterprises are primary tools of market and price manipulation for political purposes. They can be used outright for rent seeking. Yet state-owned enterprises can also play important roles in prestigious national initiatives, like major public works or high-profile social and sports events. The authors conclude that after the uniform application of democratic market economic principles, the 2000s witnessed a path-dependent departure from standard economic and political operating procedures in developed countries.
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cover of Sexual Hegemony: Statecraft, Sodomy, and Capital in the Rise of the World System

Sexual Hegemony

Statecraft, Sodomy, and Capital in the Rise of the World System

Christopher Chitty

Duke University Press, 2020

In Sexual Hegemony Christopher Chitty traces the five-hundred year history of capitalist sexual relations by excavating the class dynamics of the bourgeoisie's attempts to regulate homosexuality. Tracking the politicization of male homosexuality in Renaissance Florence, Amsterdam, Paris, and London between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as twentieth-century New York City, Chitty shows how sexuality became a crucial dimension of the accumulation of capital and a technique of bourgeois rule. Whether policing male sodomy during the Medici rule in Florence or accusing the French aristocracy of monstrous sexuality in the wake of the French Revolution, the bourgeoisie weaponized both sexual constraint and sexual freedom in order to produce and control a reliable and regimented labor class and subordinate it to civil society and the state. Only by grasping sexuality as a field of social contention and the site of class conflict, Chitty contends, can we embark on a politics that destroys sexuality as a tool and an effect of power and open a front against the forces that keep us unfree.
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cover of Shelter from the Machine: Homesteaders in the Age of Capitalism

Shelter from the Machine

Homesteaders in the Age of Capitalism

Jason G. Strange

University of Illinois Press, 2020

”You’re either buried with your crystals or your shotgun.” That laconic comment captures the hippies-versus-hicks conflict that divides, and in some ways defines, modern-day homesteaders. It also reveals that back to-the-landers, though they may seek lives off the grid, remain connected to the most pressing questions confronting the United States today.

Jason Strange shows where homesteaders fit, and don't fit, within contemporary America. Blending history with personal stories, Strange visits pig roasts and bohemian work parties to find people engaged in a lifestyle that offers challenge and fulfillment for those in search of virtues like self-employment, frugality, contact with nature, and escape from the mainstream. He also lays bare the vast differences in education and opportunity that leave some homesteaders dispossessed while charting the tensions that arise when people seek refuge from the ills of modern society—only to find themselves indelibly marked by the system they dreamed of escaping.
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cover of Slavoj Zizek: A Critical Introduction

Slavoj Zizek

A Critical Introduction

Ian Parker

Pluto Press, 2004

'When I read Ian Parker's manuscript, I experienced an underlying solidarity: despite obvious differences, we share the same basic political concerns and visions. And this makes his critical remarks always pertinent!' Slavoj Zizek

'This is not simply the best critical introduction to Zizek – in a much more radical sense, this is the only critical introduction to Zizek. Parker's study is much more than an important contribution to the ongoing debate: it redefines its very terms.' Yannis Stavrakakis, author of 'Lacan and the Political'

'A sharp, clear and radical analysis.' Christian Ingo Lenz Dunker, Professor of Psychoanalytic Theory and Lacanian Psychoanalyst, Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Since the publication of his first book in English in 1989, Slavoj Zizek has quickly become one of the most widely read and contentious intellectuals alive today. With dazzling wit and tremendous creativity he has produced innovative and challenging explorations of Lacan, Hegel and Marx, and used his insights to exhilarating effect in analyses of popular culture.

While Zizek is always engaging, he is also elusive and even contradictory. It can be very hard to finally determine where he stands on a particular issue. Is Zizek Marxist or Post-Marxist? How seriously should we take his recent turn to Christianity?

Slavoj Zizek: A Critical Introduction shows the reader a clear path through the twists and turns of Zizek's writings. Ian Parker takes Zizek's treatment of Hegel, Lacan and Marx in turn and outlines and assesses Zizek's interpretation and extension of these thinkers' theories. While Parker is never hastily dismissive of Zizek's innovations, he remains critical throughout, aware that the energy of Zizek's writing can be bewitching and beguiling as well as engaging and profound.
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cover of Social Capital Online: Alienation and Accumulation

Social Capital Online

Alienation and Accumulation

Kane X. Faucher

University of Westminster Press, 2018

What is ‘social capital’? The enormous positivity surrounding it conceals the instrumental economic rationality underpinning the notion as corporations silently sell consumer data for profit. Status chasing is just one aspect of a process of transforming qualitative aspects of social interactions into quantifiable metrics for easier processing, prediction, and behavioural shaping.

A work of critical media studies, Social Capital Online examines the idea within the new ‘network spectacle’ of digital capitalism via the ideas of Marx, Veblen, Debord, Baudrillard and Deleuze. Explaining how such phenomena as online narcissism and aggression arise, Faucher offers a new theoretical understanding of how the spectacularisation of online activity perfectly aligns with the value system of neoliberalism and its data worship. Even so, at the centre of all, lie familiar ideas – alienation and accumulation – new conceptions of which he argues are vital for understanding today’s digital society.

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cover of Social Reproduction Theory and the Socialist Horizon: Work, Power and Political Strategy

Social Reproduction Theory and the Socialist Horizon

Work, Power and Political Strategy

Aaron Jaffe

Pluto Press, 2020

How do we integrate the theoretical underpinnings of social reproduction theory (SRT) into our understanding of the social harms inflicted upon us? How can we use it to inform our struggles and affect societal change under capitalism? Integrating our understanding of productive and reproductive spheres and exploring the connection between identity-based oppression and class exploitation, SRT has emerged as a powerful Marxist frame for social analysis and political practice. In this book, Aaron Jaffe extracts SRT's radical potential, relying on recent struggles, including the International Women's Strike and the teachers' strikes, showing how we can use SRT to motivate socialist politics and strategy. Using social reproduction theory to appreciate distinct forms of social domination, this unique and necessary book will have vital strategic implications for anti-capitalists, anti-racists, LGBT activists, disability activists and feminists.
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cover of Socialism, Capitalism and Alternatives: Area Studies and Global Theories

Socialism, Capitalism and Alternatives

Area Studies and Global Theories

Edited by Peter J. S. Duncan and Elisabeth Schimpfössl

University College London, 2019

In 1989, the Berlin Wall came down. Two years later, the Soviet Union disintegrated. The collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union discredited the idea of socialism for generations to come. It was seen as representing the final and irreversible victory of capitalism. This triumphant dominance was barely challenged until the 2008 financial crisis threw the Western world into a state of turmoil. 

Through analysis of post-Socialist Russia and Central and Eastern Europe, as well as of the United Kingdom, China, and the United States, Socialism, Capitalism and Alternatives confronts the difficulty we face in articulating alternatives to capitalism, socialism, and threatening populist regimes. Beginning with accounts of the impact of capitalism on countries left behind by the planned economies, the book moves on to consider how China has become a beacon of dynamic economic growth, aggressively expanding its global influence. The final section of the book poses alternatives to the ideological dominance of neoliberalism in the West.
 
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cover of Socialism, Capitalism, Transformation

Socialism, Capitalism, Transformation

Leszek Balcerowicz

Central European University Press, 1995

This volume gathers together essays on the theme of economic transition in Central and Eastern Europe, written by the former Polish Minister of Finance.  In it, the author summarizes the research on institutions, institutional change and human behaviour that he has undertaken since the late 1970s.  He addresses such issues as the socialist market economy, reformability of the Soviet-type economic system, democratization and market-orientated reform in Central and Eastern Europe, and the Polish model of economic reform.
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cover of Solidarity in Strategy: Making Business Meaningful in American Trade Associations

Solidarity in Strategy

Making Business Meaningful in American Trade Associations

Lyn Spillman

University of Chicago Press, 2012

Popular conceptions hold that capitalism is driven almost entirely by the pursuit of profit and self-interest. Challenging that assumption, this major new study of American business associations shows how market and non-market relations are actually profoundly entwined at the heart of capitalism.

In Solidarity in Strategy, Lyn Spillman draws on rich documentary archives and a comprehensive data set of more than four thousand trade associations from diverse and obscure corners of commercial life to reveal a busy and often surprising arena of American economic activity. From the Intelligent Transportation Society to the American Gem Trade Association, Spillman explains how business associations are more collegial than cutthroat, and how they make capitalist action meaningful not only by developing shared ideas about collective interests but also by articulating a disinterested solidarity that transcends those interests.

Deeply grounded in both economic and cultural sociology, Solidarity in Strategy provides rich, lively, and often surprising insights into the world of business, and leads us to question some of our most fundamental assumptions about economic life and how cultural context influences economic.

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cover of Southern Capitalism: The Political Economy of North Carolina, 1880–1980

Southern Capitalism

The Political Economy of North Carolina, 1880–1980

Philip J. Wood

Duke University Press, 1986

Southern Capitalism challenges prevailing views of Southern development by arguing that the persisting peculiarities of the Southern economy—such as low wages and high poverty rates—have not resulted from barriers to capitalist development, nor from the lingering influence of planter values. Wood argues that these peculiarities can instead be best understood as the consequence of a strategy of capitalist development, based on the creation and preservation of social conditions and relations conducive to the above-average exploitation of labor by capital. focusing on the evolving relationship between capital and labor as the core of this strategy, Wood follows the process of capitalist industrialization in North Carolina from its beginnings in the aftermath of the Civil War to the 1980s.
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cover of Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History

Specters of the Atlantic

Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History

Ian Baucom

Duke University Press, 2005

In September 1781, the captain of the British slave ship Zong ordered 133 slaves thrown overboard, enabling the ship’s owners to file an insurance claim for their lost “cargo.” Accounts of this horrific event quickly became a staple of abolitionist discourse on both sides of the Atlantic. Ian Baucom revisits, in unprecedented detail, the Zong atrocity, the ensuing court cases, reactions to the event and trials, and the business and social dealings of the Liverpool merchants who owned the ship. Drawing on the work of an astonishing array of literary and social theorists, including Walter Benjamin, Giovanni Arrighi, Jacques Derrida, and many others, he argues that the tragedy is central not only to the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the political and cultural archives of the black Atlantic but also to the history of modern capital and ethics. To apprehend the Zong tragedy, Baucom suggests, is not to come to terms with an isolated atrocity but to encounter a logic of violence key to the unfolding history of Atlantic modernity.

Baucom contends that the massacre and the trials that followed it bring to light an Atlantic cycle of capital accumulation based on speculative finance, an economic cycle that has not yet run its course. The extraordinarily abstract nature of today’s finance capital is the late-eighteenth-century system intensified. Yet, as Baucom highlights, since the late 1700s, this rapacious speculative culture has had detractors. He traces the emergence and development of a counter-discourse he calls melancholy realism through abolitionist and human-rights texts, British romantic poetry, Scottish moral philosophy, and the work of late-twentieth-century literary theorists. In revealing how the Zong tragedy resonates within contemporary financial systems and human-rights discourses, Baucom puts forth a deeply compelling, utterly original theory of history: one that insists that an eighteenth-century atrocity is not past but present within the future we now inhabit.

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cover of Spectropolis: The Enchantment of Capital in Singapore

Spectropolis

The Enchantment of Capital in Singapore

Joshua Comaroff

University of Minnesota Press, 2025

How economic transformation and the spirit world collide in hypermodern Singapore

 

In Singapore, the financial center of Southeast Asia, hyperurbanization and commercial development exist alongside enduring belief in the economic power of ghosts: in their ability to control the flows of money and value and to determine the outcome of investments and wagers. Spectropolis explores the unlikely collusion of these two systems, demonstrating both the productive role of popular beliefs in the modern world and the surprising correlations between “late” capitalism and the workings of the spirit realm.

 

Detailing the logic and practices of Singapore’s ghost economy—from performing exorcisms on real estate development sites to offering money and commodities to the dead as a hedge against precarious real-world transactions—Joshua Comaroff shows how speculative finance, largely governed by chance and volatility, is understood via its inherently spectral qualities. Through the influence of Chinese Buddhist-Taoist thought, the movement of capital is placed under the sway of cosmology and geomancy, resulting in a built environment that is both technologically advanced and quite literally enchanted.

 

Based on detailed case studies and years of extensive fieldwork, Spectropolis argues for the power of popular belief systems to theorize contemporary socioeconomic conditions and to give form to collective affect as well as shared aspirations and anxieties. As Comaroff demonstrates, the uniquely all-consuming nature of Singapore’s tightly compressed urban economy is such that it may subsume even that which lies beyond the threshold of life itself.

 

 

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cover of Speculation: Politics, Ideology, Event

Speculation

Politics, Ideology, Event

Glyn Daly

Northwestern University Press, 2019

Speculation: Politics, Ideology, Event develops Hegel’s radical perspective of speculative thought as a way of reclaiming and revitalizing the sense of the future and its possibilities. Engaging with such figures as Alain Badiou, Quentin Meillassoux, Ernesto Laclau, Slavoj Žižek, and Fredric Jameson, Glyn Daly articulates the distinctness of speculative philosophy and draws its implications for new debates in areas of science, politics, capitalism, ideology, ethics, and the event. 

In a confrontation with today’s fatalistic milieu, principal emphasis is given to Hegel’s idea of infinity as the intrinsic dimension of negativity within all finitude. Against the modern era’s paradigmatic tendency to externalize social problems in the form of antagonism and Otherness, Daly argues for a renewal of utopian thought based on Hegelian reconciliation and the affirmation of excess as the essence of all being. On these grounds, he advances a new kind of political imagination that in speculative terms centers on uncompromising notions of truth and reason. 
 

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cover of Speculative Communities: Living with Uncertainty in a Financialized World

Speculative Communities

Living with Uncertainty in a Financialized World

Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou

University of Chicago Press, 2022

Speculative Communities investigates the financial world’s influence on the social imagination, unraveling its radical effects on our personal and political lives.

In Speculative Communities, Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou examines the ways that speculation has moved beyond financial markets to shape fundamental aspects of our social and political lives. As ordinary people make exceptional decisions, such as the American election of a populist demagogue or the British vote to leave the European Union, they are moving from time-honored and -tested practices of governance, toward the speculative promise of a new, more uncertain future. This book shows how even our methods of building community have shifted to the speculative realm as social media platforms enable and amplify our volatile wagers.

For Komporozos-Athanasiou, “to speculate” means increasingly “to connect,” to endorse the unknown pre-emptively, and often daringly, as a means of social survival. Grappling with the question of how more uncertainty can lead to its full-throated embrace rather than dissent, Speculative Communities shows how finance has become the model for society writ large. As Komporozos-Athanasiou argues, virtual marketplaces, new social media, and dating apps bring finance’s opaque infrastructures into the most intimate realms of our lives, leading to a new type of speculative imagination across economy, culture, and society.
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cover of Stealing Shining Rivers: Agrarian Conflict, Market Logic, and Conservation in a Mexican Forest

Stealing Shining Rivers

Agrarian Conflict, Market Logic, and Conservation in a Mexican Forest

Molly Doane

University of Arizona Press, 2012

Winner, Best Social Sciences Book (Latin American Studies Association, Mexico Section)

What happens to indigenous people when their homelands are declared by well-intentioned outsiders to be precious environmental habitats? In this revelatory book, Molly Doane describes how a rain forest in Mexico’s southern state of Oaxaca was appropriated and redefined by environmentalists who initially wanted to conserve its biodiversity. Her case study approach shows that good intentions are not always enough to produce results that benefit both a habitat and its many different types of inhabitants.

Doane begins by showing how Chimalapas—translated as “shining rivers”—has been “produced” in various ways over time, from a worthless wasteland to a priceless asset. Focusing on a series of environmental projects that operated between 1990 and 2008, she reveals that environmentalists attempted to recast agrarian disputes—which actually stemmed from government-supported corporate incursions into community lands and from unequal land redistribution—as environmental problems.

Doane focuses in particular on the attempt throughout the 1990s to establish a “Campesino Ecological Reserve” in Chimalapas. Supported by major grants from the World Wildlife Foundation (WWF), this effort to foster and merge agrarian and environmental interests was ultimately unsuccessful because it was seen as politically threatening by the state. By 2000, the Mexican government had convinced the WWF to redirect its conservation monies to the state government and its agencies.

The WWF eventually abandoned attempts to establish an “enclosure” nature reserve in the region or to gain community acceptance for conservation. Instead, working from a new market-based model of conservation, the WWF began paying cash to individuals for “environmental services” such as reforestation and environmental monitoring.
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cover of Steam City: Railroads, Urban Space, and Corporate Capitalism in Nineteenth-Century Baltimore

Steam City

Railroads, Urban Space, and Corporate Capitalism in Nineteenth-Century Baltimore

David Schley

University of Chicago Press, 2020

Anyone interested in the rise of American corporate capitalism should look to the streets of Baltimore. There, in 1827, citizens launched a bold new venture: a “rail-road” that would link their city with the fertile Ohio River Valley. They dubbed this company the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad (B&O), and they conceived of it as a public undertaking—an urban improvement, albeit one that would stretch hundreds of miles beyond the city limits.

Steam City tells the story of corporate capitalism starting from the street and moving outward, looking at how the rise of the railroad altered the fabric of everyday life in the United States. The B&O’s founders believed that their new line would remap American economic geography, but no one imagined that the railroad would also dramatically reshape the spaces of its terminal city. As railroad executives wrangled with city officials over their use of urban space, they formulated new ideas about the boundaries between public good and private profit. Ultimately, they reinvented the B&O as a private enterprise, unmoored to its home city. This bold reconception had implications not only for the people of Baltimore, but for the railroad industry as a whole. As David Schley shows here, privatizing the B&O helped set the stage for the rise of the corporation as a major force in the post-Civil War economy.

​Steam City examines how the birth and spread of the American railroad—which brought rapid communications, fossil fuels, and new modes of corporate organization to the city—changed how people worked, where they lived, even how they crossed the street. As Schley makes clear, we still live with the consequences of this spatial and economic order today.
 
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cover of Stories of Capitalism: Inside the Role of Financial Analysts

Stories of Capitalism

Inside the Role of Financial Analysts

Stefan Leins

University of Chicago Press, 2018

The financial crisis and the recession that followed caught many people off guard, including experts in the financial sector whose jobs involve predicting market fluctuations. Financial analysis offices in most international banks are supposed to forecast the rise or fall of stock prices, the success or failure of investment products, and even the growth or decline of entire national economies. And yet their predictions are heavily disputed. How do they make their forecasts—and do those forecasts have any actual value?
 
Building on recent developments in the social studies of finance, Stories of Capitalism provides the first ethnography of financial analysis. Drawing on two years of fieldwork in a Swiss bank, Stefan Leins argues that financial analysts construct stories of possible economic futures, presenting them as coherent and grounded in expert research and analysis. In so doing, they establish a role for themselves—not necessarily by laying bare empirically verifiable trends but rather by presenting the market as something that makes sense and is worth investing in. Stories of Capitalism is a nuanced look at how banks continue to boost investment—even in unstable markets—and a rare insider’s look into the often opaque financial practices that shape the global economy.
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cover of Survival of a Perverse Nation: Morality and Queer Possibility in Armenia

Survival of a Perverse Nation

Morality and Queer Possibility in Armenia

Tamar R. Shirinian

Duke University Press, 2024

In Survival of a Perverse Nation, Tamar R. Shirinian traces two widespread rhetorics of perversion—sexual and moral—in postsocialist Armenia, showing how they are tied to anxieties about the nation’s survival. In her fieldwork with Armenians, Shirinian found that right-wing nationalists’ focus on sexual perversion centers the figure of the homosexual, while questions of moral perversion surround oligarchs and other members of the political-economic elite. While the homosexual is seen as non- or improperly reproductive, the oligarch’s moral deviations from the caring and paternalistic expectations associated with national leadership also endanger Armenia’s survival. Shirinian shows how both figures threaten the nation’s proper social reproduction, a source of great anxiety for a nation whose primary point of identity is surviving genocide. In the existential threat posed by these forms of perversion Shirinian finds paths where nonsurvival might mean the creation of futures that are queerer and more just. Detailing how the language of perversion offers trenchant critiques of capitalism as a perversion of life, Shirinian presents a new queer theory of political economy.
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cover of Sustainable Capitalism: Essential Work for the Anthropocene

Sustainable Capitalism

Essential Work for the Anthropocene

Edited by Inara Scott

University of Utah Press, 2024

Capitalism has been linked to climate change, racism and slavery, wealth inequality, and the decline of democracy. At the same time, capitalism may have been instrumental in lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, facilitating vast technological innovations, and improving standards of living across the globe. As climate change accelerates and the world is threatened with existential crises, we must ask: Is capitalism incompatible with sustainability? While this question is as complex and urgent as it is resistant to simple answers, the contributors to this volume make the case that a more sustainable capitalism is within our reach.

Sustainable Capitalism takes on the challenge of sustainability from a uniquely interdisciplinary and diverse perspective, offering both theory and tools for action. Topics range from an analysis of the foundations and definition of capitalism to the specific regulatory mechanisms that may be necessary to rein in its current, unsustainable trajectory. Readers will find nuanced and important analyses of options and potential outcomes that are not available in any other work. This book is essential reading for anyone concerned about the path we are on and how we might improve the lives of people around the globe.

https://www.sustainablecapitalismbook.com/
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cover of Sweatshop Capital: Profit, Violence, and Solidarity Movements in the Long Twentieth Century

Sweatshop Capital

Profit, Violence, and Solidarity Movements in the Long Twentieth Century

Beth Robinson

Duke University Press, 2025

In Sweatshop Capital, Beth Robinson examines the brutal sweatshop labor conditions that produced American consumer goods from the late nineteenth through the early twenty-first centuries, as well as the labor and social movements that contested them. Arguing that sweatshop labor is a persistent feature of capitalism, she shows how manufacturers used both their influence in government and their mobility to sidestep US labor laws, maximize profits, and perpetuate abuses. She outlines how workers and their allies routinely confronted manufacturers by building solidarity networks across race, class, and national lines. Drawing on activists’ literature, news accounts, archival sources, and oral histories, Robinson presents the long history of the antisweatshop movements that responded to American capital’s pursuit of profit through hyperexploitation with a wide range of protest, legal action, and creativity. Beginning with the sweatshops and reformers of the Progressive Era, Robinson moves through the Great Depression and the activism of the Popular Front, the “free trade” globalization of the 1990s and its discontents, and, finally, the global cyber and gig economies of the twenty-first century and the growing movements to rein them in.
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cover of Systems, Institutions, and Values in East and West: Engaging with János Kornai's Scholarship

Systems, Institutions, and Values in East and West

Engaging with János Kornai's Scholarship

Miklós Rosta

Central European University Press, 2020

Leading social scientists, empirical analysts, and policy practitioners demonstrate the various ways in which the insights of János Kornai, a renowned early analyst and critic of the command economies of Eastern European communist states, are stirring academic and policy discussions about current challenges. While dissecting the economic theories and practices in the Soviet Bloc, Kornai devised and applied concepts such as soft-budget constraints, rush versus harmonic growth, surplus versus shortage economy, non-Walrasian equilibrium, bureaucratic coordination, and the invisible power of the communist party. These concepts are commonly applied to a variety of issues in the contexts of fundamental transformation. The cases discussed in this volume include the transitional paths of post-communist economies, the pitfalls of East European market-building, economic repercussions of the dissolution of Yugoslavia, and the process of integration in the Eurozone.

In conclusion János Kornai’s thoughts on a variety of research topics as well as the value of democracy are included as he delivered at the conference celebrating his 90th birthday in 2018.

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