Volume 54, Number 9 · May 31, 2007
Winning a Gamble with Communism
By Robert Skidelsky
By Force of Thought: Irregular Memoirs of an Intellectual Journey
by János Kornai
MIT Press, 461 pp., $40.00
The Hungarian János Kornai is the most famous, and certainly the most influential, economist to have emerged from postwar Communist Europe.[1] His reputation is based on three books, Overcentralization, Economics of Shortage, and The Socialist System, which knocked away the intellectual foundations of the publicly owned, bureaucratically planned economy. In one sense, he was in the line of critics of central planning such as Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek, who had argued in the 1930s that it could not be efficient. But Kornai was the first of these critics who wrote from the concrete experience of a centrally planned economy. His books were a stylized rendering of an actually existing socialist economy, not an imagined one, written by someone who—while cultivating extensive contacts with Western scholars and holding, from the mid-1980s, a dual appointment at Harvard University—elected to stay and work in Hungary right through the postwar years.
Review, 4409 words
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