hps.cesee & CHORUS book talk: Economic Knowledge in Socialism 1949-1989

Friday, October 30, 17:00-19:00 Central European Time (CET) / 19:00-21:00 MSK/ 12:00-14:00 EDT

The virtual platform HPS.CESEE and CHORUS: Colloquium for the History Of Russian Science are proud to present the global book talk Economic Knowledge in Socialism, 1945–1989. Elisabeth Bishop (San Marcos) and Kristy Ironside (Montréal, TBC) will join with Ivan Boldyrev (Nijmegen) and Till Düppe (Montréal), to discuss their recently published volume "Economic Knowledge in Socialism 1945-1989" (History of Political Economy (2019) 51 (Supplement 1)). It is part of a series of open zoom events aiming to foster the discussion of new books and approaches within the history of science and scholarship (broadly understood) in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe.

“Economic Knowledge in Socialism, 1945–1989” represents an exemplary cross-disciplinary effort for better understanding various domains of economic knowledge and, more broadly, the social sciences in the Eastern bloc. The variety of approaches, including history of ideas, oral history, anthropology, sociology, and the wealth of subjects from mathematical economics to the science of labor, from systems science to Marxist political economy, make this a fascinating read for those interested not only in the history of economics, but also in Soviet and Eastern European history, history of Marxism and socialism, international relations, and sociology of science. The papers explore the entanglement of ideology and economic discourse, the political dimensions of cybernetic technocracy, and the various faces of Cold War rationality in socialism. Together they present a rich picture of the epistemic cultures of economists responding to, resisting, and stabilizing socialist regimes.

The meeting is open to the public. To receive the link, please fill the contact data here: https://forms.gle/ZMHs75hDZk24g6fd9 or write to hps.cesee@gmail.com. The link will be distributed 24 hours before the start of the meeting.

Elisabeth Bishop is associate professor of history at Texas State University-San Marcos. She works on Arab history, postcolonial history and history of the global Cold War. Her first book Spaces of the High Dam, exploring the construction, political and economic significance of Aswan High Dam is forthcoming with American University in Cairo Press. Currently she is working on international tensions in the Arab world in the 1950s.

Ivan Boldyrev is assistant professor for economic theory and policy at Radboud University, Nijmegen. His historical work investigates the entanglement of economic knowledge, economic theories, and social/political practices, while as philosopher he works on the relationships between literature and philosophy, and on paradoxes and tensions in the philosophy of history, focusing mainly, but not exclusively, on Hegel, Romanticism, and critical theory.

Till Düppe is associate professor at the University of Québec in Montréal. His main research interest is the historical epistemology of economics, inspired by phenomenological philosophy. His publications discuss the various transformations of economic knowledge during the early Cold War, recently with special attention to the Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic.

Kristy Ironside is a historian of modern Russia and the Soviet Union at McGill University, Montréal. She is especially interested in the political, economic, and social history of Russia and the USSR’s twentieth century. Her first book, A Full-Value Ruble: The Promise of Prosperity in the Postwar Soviet Union, is forthcoming with Harvard University Press in 2021. This book looks at how money, an ideologically problematic ‘vestige of capitalism,’ was mobilized by the Soviet government in the intertwined projects of recovering from the Second World War’s damage and building a prosperous communist society.