2007 Ed A. Hewett Book Prize Winner
The AAASS Ed A. Hewett Book Prize, sponsored by the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research (NCEEER), is awarded annually for an outstanding publication on the political economy of the centrally planned economies of the former Soviet Union and East Central Europe and their transitional successors.
János Kornai
The 2007 Ed A. Hewett Book Prize was awarded to János Kornai, for By Force of Thought: Irregular Memoirs of an Intellectual Journey, published by MIT Press.
Janos Kornai’s life has been inextricably linked with the history of Hungary starting with World War II, then experiencing Soviet domination, the 1956 uprising, the economic reforms under “Goulash communism,” and finally the transition from communism and entry into the European Union. His comprehensive analysis of the socialist economy has had a lasting influence on the social sciences. The “soft budget constraint” concept has become part of standard economics. His work on transition has been very influential. His wise prognostications and prescriptions for transition policy have proved in hindsight to be quite on target in many dimensions, such as on the speed of privatization.
In this extraordinary book, Janos Kornai not only tells of his life experiences and the concurrent history of Hungary. More importantly, he leads us through his intellectual evolution, explaining how his thinking evolved, how it was influenced by events, how one research question led to another. This brings alive the intellectual and historical developments that led to Kornai’s work on socialist incentives, on the theory of planning, on the economics of shortage, and on the transition from socialism to capitalism. Kornai takes us on a wonderful journey that encompasses large elements of the history of economic thought in the latter half of the twentieth century, as well as the history of socialist Eastern Europe, showing how deeply intertwined the two have been.
Intellectual autobiographies are rare in economics, and even rarer are autobiographies that show in such an evocative way where the ideas of economists come from. Kornai’s precision and sense for detail give the reader deep insight into the intellectual journey of one of the twentieth century’s most independent minds, and one of its most acute thinkers.
