The publication of János Kornai's memoirs, By Force of Thought, provides an excellent opportunity to remind ourselves of Kornai's great contributions to economic research. This paper discusses both his basic research strategy and some of his main research results. Kornai has usually dealt with...

Kazimierz Łaski's first contributions to economics were on the theory of growth and equilibrium in the socialist economy. He gravitated in between Włodzimierz Brus, who argued that the economy could be brought into equilibrium through market mechanisms, and the most profound influence on...

This paper takes off from Jan Kregel's paper 'Shylock and Hamlet, or Are There Bulls and Bears in the Circuit?' (1986), which aimed to remedy shortcomings in most expositions of the circuit approach. While some circuitistes have rejected John Maynard Keynes's liquidity preference theory, Kregel...

[Eliminating history from economic thought] Formal analysis, in which maximizing agents use today's 'true' model of the economy to form expectation upon which they then base their behaviour, trivializes the role of the future in economic life and ignores the possibility that the past's models,...

Jon Elster gehört zu den profiliertesten Sozialwissenschaftlern der internationalen ‚scientific community'. Der vorliegende Beitrag entwickelt eine Lesart für sein bisher vorliegendes Gesamtwerk: In einem ersten Schritt wird Elsters Kritik an funktionalistischen Fehlschlüssen in den...

Douglass North gehört zu den führenden Sozialwissenschaftlern des 20. Jahrhunderts. Er wurde für seine bahnbrechenden Leistungen auf dem Gebiet der ökonomischen Geschichtstheorie mit dem Nobelpreis ausgezeichnet. Dieser Aufsatz rekonstruiert (a) seine kliometrische Diagnose der Moderne, (b)...

Political economists, both mainstream and Marxist, find it difficult to reconcile the «real» and «financial» appearances of capital. The conventional view is that «real» capital is an objective productive entity; that «finance» merely reflects this reality; and that, unfortunately, the...

Starting from Schumpeter.s important distinction between .real analysis. and .monetary analysis., in this paper it is shown that major elements of Marx.s economic theory fall in the camp of monetary analysis and the implications for Marx.s theory of capital accumulation are derived. First,...

This paper compares Marx's economics with those by Sraffa, Keynes, Kalecki and Minsky. The paper takes an "ex post" view on the matter and rather looks at the output side of the respective authors, but not at the input side. This means no attempt is made at studying in a systematic way, if and...