Conclusion: Economic Knowledge and Authoritarian State

Social and historical studies of late socialist and post-socialist economics have often suggested a direct influence of economic ideas on the process of policy change: the differences in ideas would explain the different outcomes of market transformations in different countries (Wagener 1998), or even the “failure” of liberalization policies (Zweynert 2018). Ideas are important, but our argument in this book is that what economists think and do is not an independent causal factor. Instead, their transformative potential is shaped by social relations and political processes, as well as by the social structures of economic knowledge production and diffusion. The entire history of Soviet and post-Soviet social science is one in which the dominance of the state over professional and public institutions made the role of intellectuals particularly precarious and dependent on political configurations. At the same time, this study sought to challenge the totalitarian perspective by exploring the possibilities for economists to negotiate the spaces of relative autonomy, produce critical discourses, and shape the state’s plans of action. The perestroika and transition periods were exceptional in this respect for socialist reform economists, who pursued various paths to power and helped bring about change.