Introduction

This book develops and elaborates upon my monograph Eine Geschichte des ökonomischen Denkens in Russland 1805–1905 (A History of Russian Economic Reasoning 1805–1905, 2002). ¹ This book was meant both as a study of the history of economic ideas and as a contribution to research into the historical and cultural dimensions of post-socialist change. Following Karl Pribram’s (1983: 40) assertion that “prerequisite to any change in social or economic institutions or organisations is a change of the prevailing pattern of reasoning which had provided the background to the predominant forms of social and economic life”, I asked whether analysing the history of Russian economic reasoning might help us to understand why in post-Soviet Russia the implementation of a market economy after 1991 encountered so much resistance. In a greatly simplified and abbreviated form, my answer was that in the history of Russian economic ideas (and in Russian social philosophy in general), a peculiar mix of anthropocentrism and holism provided fertile breeding ground for patterns of thought that were in potential conflict with the market. These patterns, I argued, didn’t render the emergence of capitalism in Russia impossible. But they entailed a deep intellectual division between adherents and fundamental opponents of Russia’s capitalist transformation that made Russia’s social evolution unstable and vulnerable to external shocks.