Opportunities of constraints: A sociologist’s reflections on János Kornai’s By Force of Thought

摘要

This essay reviews the intellectual memoir by János Kornai, the leading economist working under the constraints of politicized academic life in the former Soviet bloc. Kornai retells the major ideas of his work through the lens of the various periods in his life and the ethical dilemmas faced in each. Constraints, it is shown, provided opportunities. Kornai’s work offers a model of a public intellectual, committed to empirical analysis of social processes, and independent from political parties and from intellectual camps in the economics profession.