CityReads│By Force of Thought:Kornai's Intellectual Journey
By Force of Thought:
Kornai's Intellectual Journey
János Kornai, a Hungarian economist, traces his lifelong intellectual journey and offers a subjective complement to his academic research.
János Kornai,2008. By Force of Thought: Irregular Memoirs of an Intellectual Journey, Cambridge, Massachusetts-London, England: MIT Press.
Source: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/force-thought
János Kornai is a distinguished Hungarian economist. He was born János Kornhauser until he decided of his own accord in 1945 to take the name Kornai.
His father was a successful lawyer, who specialized in the Hungarian business affairs of German companies. The family apartment and his father’s office were on a prestigious street in Budapest, where housed the headquarters of the Hungarian Academy of Science at one end and the Parliament at the other. The building now houses the office of the Prime Minister’s staff.
Unfortunately, his father was taken away by German and died during the Second World War. He lost family members in the Holocaust.
János Kornai began his adult life as an ardent believer in socialism and then became a critic of the communist political and economic system. He 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.
Decisions for a Lifetime
There are no desperate situations in which no choice remains and the responsibility for deciding can be avoided. In this biography, Kornai explained the major decisions in his lifetime: choice between politics and research; breaking with the Marxism, and the choice of staying in Hungary instead of emigration.
Looking back on his work as a journalist on a Communist newspaper between 1947 and 1955, he said, “Even when I was working in it, I did not consider journalism a real vocation; I felt I had followed a political career from 1945 to 1955, and it was secondary whether my political role had been as a functionary in the youth movement or an editor on the central party daily”.
He criticized his writings at that time, “The style was quite smooth, with hardly any of the infelicities of expression found in many newspaper articles. But they contain irritatingly simplistic praise for good results and achievements. Whenever I ran up against any problem in those days, my solution was to urge people—using the imperative mood—to overcome the mistake”. And “I apologize to all whom I damaged with my writings, but deeds are still more important than sincere words of apology”.
He does not believe the damage someone does at one stage in life can be offset by meritorious acts in another. Sins are irreparable. Their victims may no longer be living when the ostensible recompense is made or may not be the beneficiaries of the good deeds. Even if they are alive, even if they or their descendants profit from the good deeds, the wrong that was suffered before cannot in this way be righted.
Kornai was disillusioned by politics and disgusted and deceived by it. But he also acknowledged that it takes two to be deceived, a cheat and someone who allows him or herself to be cheated. “Now that I had seen the crimes committed by people drunk with power, I decided finally that I was not going to strive for it. I would reject all positions in which even the temptation of power might appear”.
“Not only had I understood that I had taken a false path in the first stage of my adult life but I stepped onto a new one with full determination”. By 1959, Kornai made some of basic decisions in his lifetime: to break with the Communist Party; not to emigrate; to devote into research, not politics; to break with Marxism; and to learn the basics of modern economics.
These five decisions held for the rest of his life. “I do not claim that I have followed them all without exception in all instances. People are frail. But I certainly tried to keep to my strategy in life as far as possible. If I erred against one of my principles, I would reproach myself later. I attach great value to the moral imperative of being true to oneself”.
After he began his work as researcher, Kornai finally found his calling. “I found great pleasure in research work. The conversations were absorbing. I gladly worked on my notes and found the writing enjoyable too. As for the flashes when I felt I had stumbled on something, found something out, they count among the happiest moments in my life. I had discovered the right place for myself at last”.
Breaking with Maxism
Young Kornai was fascinated by Marx’s Capital. “The logic and clarity impressed me most, but I also respected and loved Capital for being written with passion, not gray indifference. It speaks with outrage about the treatment of child labor and the exploitation of the proletariat…As I progressed in my knowledge of Marxism-Leninism, I became increasingly convinced that I held the key to understanding the world. Whatever problem arose, I possessed knowledge that allowed me to solve it. Life presented no phenomenon that I could not peg into the system of coordinates provided by Marxism or refute with some argument from Marxism”.
His faith in communism was shaken as he recognized the lies and brutality around him.
According to its own assertions, Marxism alone presents a scientific method for researching society and comprehending the body of knowledge about it. He broke with Marxism because he became convinced that it lacked foundations in precisely this respect. He pulled himself out from the bog of Marxism by his own hair.
Kornai began with increasing decisiveness to take another approach—to compare the theory with reality. And if they see that reality departs in essential ways from theory, they have to alter the theory or, if such alteration is not possible, reject it.
The problem was not just that the theories performed badly in all these comparisons, that the Marxist dogmas failed to match reality. The main trouble was that Marx himself and his later disciples did not feel the primary intellectual duty to apply the elementary criterion of scholarship: testing their ideas against reality.
At some point, around the end of 1955, Kornai gave up Marxism. “I announced, first to myself, that I was not a Marxist any longer. I would not reject every one of the theory’s methods or statements, but I would reject the ‘-ism’ as such, the Marxian intellectual edifice”.
Due to the uncertainties of 1956–1957, there were floods of refugees from Hungary. But Kornai decided to stay. He had two chances to emigrate. He turned down offers of university jobs at Cambridge in England and the other from Princeton University in America, which would have meant leaving Hungary.
He explains the reasons why he is so tied to Hungary. The reasons are dominated by sentimental ties. “I had a myriad of emotional ties to Hungary. I had always been moved and delighted on returning from abroad to cross the Chain Bridge or Elizabeth Bridge and see the view of Budapest unfold. I had a portrait of Bartok on the wall of my room at Harvard”.
“I think in Hungarian. I never read my lectures; I always deliver them, even in English, freely. I can express myself with ease in English, but I much prefer to write in Hungarian and I do that much better”.
“I have real, true friends in Hungary and abroad, but my friends with whom half a word tells all and to whom I am bound by our entire past, which likewise binds them to me, are confined only to Hungary”.
“I resigned myself to staying in Hungary in periods of repression and strong restrictions on freedom, and to all the drawbacks of Hungarian citizenship”.
But there were also other, professional considerations behind the decision not to emigrate. “I had specialized in the socialist system and the post-socialist transition, subjects with which many people in the West dealt as well. What gave my work special authenticity was that everything from my first book to my last article was written by someone who had himself seen and experienced what went on. I have done much research on general subjects, but I have based it on Hungary as an example. Many articles of mine state that approach from the outset: the main title defines the general subject and the subtitle adds ‘‘in the light of Hungarian experience.’’
“Individuals have a sovereign right to choose where they want to live. I do not view emigrating as morally inferior to staying at home. A moral judgment on someone’s life must rest on deeds, not simply on the choice of country to live in”.
Is the World Going to Get Any Better？
The quick answer is a “yes”.
“My studies had been focused for decades on exploring the nature of socialism and capitalism and comparing them. The change of system from socialism to capitalism we have been living through is really a huge achievement. My feeling of taking part in a fortunate turning point in history did not end with the first euphoria of 1989–1990. It persists today, a decade and a half later.
I have no illusions about capitalism. The transition from socialism to capitalism brought a lot of problems, such as mass unemployment and malignant inequalities. Despite its detrimental and morally nasty features, I concluded I would sooner live under the capitalist system than in the happiest barrack in the socialist camp.
The society we live in is in ferment, mixing bad with good, beautiful with tawdry. There is no such thing as a disease-free socioeconomic system, but we can choose our diseases.
There has been a Hungarian tradition for centuries: you are resigned or desperate or angry and a happy outlook is uncertain or improbable— and yet, you work hard and honestly for improvement.
In me, the mix of optimism and pessimism has tipped toward optimism since the change of system. I have turned into an optimist who recognizes the problems and wishes to alleviate them.
History was offering a laboratory in which we could see how a great transformation took place over what was, in historical terms, an incredibly short time”.