New course economics: The field of economic research in Hungary after Stalin, 1953-6

Abstract

This article focuses on the origins of state-socialist Hungary's 'reform economics'. Two major transformations gave rise to a radical re-orientation of the field of academic economics in the New Course era following Stalin's death: on the one hand, a shift took place in the epistemological regime of economics from class-relativism to naive empiricism, springing from an increased awareness of the political power of its dependence on social-scientific expertise and knowledge. Naive empiricism and a more pronounced professional attitude connected with it provided, on the other hand, the young Communist intellectuals of the field with a feasible way out of the deep political and moral crisis into which their previous party-soldier ethos and identity had brought them. Their opposition to the Stalinist political and academic regime was expressed and fuelled by a revival of some of the most central intellectual and political attitudes characterising interwar Hungary's movement of sociographers. © 1997 Cambridge University Press.