Part I. Fields of Discourses and Theory: Economics and Russia. Introduction to Part I

Transcription

1 Part I Fields of Discourses and Theory: Economics and Russia Introduction to Part I Part I uses insights and logics of a field framework to explore the intellectual history of Russian economics as discourse and discipline a community of discourse, to use Robert Wuthnow s phrase. While our authors employ fields in a subtle way, focusing on actual events, biographies, and actions (including production of knowledge), fields are certainly part of their stories. The core to these fields were institutions, personal networks (friends, colleagues), and more virtual networks of communication (journals, discussion circles of intellectual society). Economics as a particular discourse about the material world and the nature of wealth arose in Western Europe in the contexts of discussions and analyses of production and trade, states and policies, and statistics as a new methodology for measuring and analyzing social practices. In some countries (e.g. Great Britain), economics arose among circles of private intellectuals who were making appeals to their state and other intellectuals, but they were still writing from their own volition. In other countries (e.g. France and Germany), economics arose in the context of state institutions and emerging universities. Economics and statistical methods were to be harnessed so that states could craft policies that would serve state power (and perhaps their nations as well) economists more as technocrats than as independent intellectuals. Overall, economics

2 22 Fields of Discourses and Theory: Economics and Russia emerged initially as a community of individuals in a variety of institutional contexts pontificating on a wide range of subjects. Over the nineteenth century, economics as its own discourse and discipline began to emerge, albeit not without some conflict and controversy: for example, the battle of the methods (historical versus quantitative analyses) or the boundaries and content of the discipline (as witnessed in the separation of economics proper from its parent, political economy ). One key to a field is a sense of collective orientation or organized striving, which is compelled by different kinds of forces. Following DiMaggio and Powell, there can be the perceived need to mimic other actors and collective practices because they address a similar challenge or seem legitimate in broader contexts, the need to enact particular practices and routines as a condition of receiving some kind of resource, or common socialization, so that shared practices come more naturally as legitimate and natural than other innovations. All of these dynamics emerged even in the eighteenth century and accelerated over time, as competition in the field of emerging nation-states grew and institutional fields of intellectual activity (especially universities) expanded as well. While Russia was still a latecomer, it was not far behind in such institutional development. Russia had its own elite universities in St. Petersburg and Moscow, the Academy of Sciences, and universities or other educational institutions in other major cities. State officials were increasingly keen to strengthen Russia s capacities as a great power. And actors in these institutions quickly understood that Russia was embedded in international fields of discourse, embryonic as they were: while there were no national or international disciplinary conferences that we have today, there were still circles of networks and local institutions (especially universities) that produced knowledge. And so, in a tradition going back to Peter the Great, who visited Europe to learn what his neighbors had to offer, Russian intellectuals and officials turned to the West again. Sometimes the state brought Europeans to Russia to educate their own in nascent economic science; later, the state sent some promising young scholars abroad to further their educations. More importantly, Russian intellectuals themselves interested in various topics, including political economy and related issues, turned to Western publications and intellectuals.

3 Fields of Discourses and Theory: Economics and Russia 23 This international field of institutions and other social groups aligned in a sense of intellectual endeavor and identity vis-à-vis each other as well as their own populations existed alongside domestic Russian social fields that shaped how economics came to be in Russia. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a civil society was developing in Russia as well: in particular, circles of educated elites and educated and talented Russians from lower classes, and a growing sense of corporate identity embedded in a shared sense of intellectual interest and mission, a proto-discipline, as it were. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Russian universities began to establish formal positions and programs for political economy and statistics, creating the formal foundation for economics as a potential profession, rather than personal calling facilitated by networks of like-minded intellectuals and local societies of educated and curious elite and middle-class participants. The creation of these formal positions was the work of state and university officials and scholars themselves, some of whom took it on themselves to add ideas and energy to ground economics not only in individual talents, but also in formal occupations with status and income. Of course, not all burgeoning economists had access to such positions; some continued to rely on networks and local societies, some of which were imbibing Marxism and existing in the shadows to escape the watchful eye of suspicious state police. By the dawn of the twentieth century, economists as we understand them today a technocratic practice combining institutional position (i.e. in universities), social role (i.e. legitimate producer of particular knowledge), and relation (i.e. individual networked to similar individuals sharing corporate and intellectual identity) was taking shape. Revolutions in 1905 and 1917 would disturb the development of these fields of institutions, positions, and relations, after 1917, giving birth to a new type of modernity, that of Soviet socialism. Authors in Part I explore various facets of this general field story. Shirokorad provides a general overview of the twin sources of Russian economics: the Russian state and foreign fields of actors and discourses, primarily German. Russian economics ended up caught in between these two forces that sometimes were complementary, and sometimes contradictory: German scholars and institutions (universities) offered the human capital the Russian state desperately needed, yet that knowledge

4 24 Fields of Discourses and Theory: Economics and Russia could threaten the status quo on which the Russian state depended, from serfdom to autocracy. Put differently, Shirokorad s story is that the field of economics in Russia again, a combination of discourse, institutions, and professional roles and identity is a story of two other fields (European, and especially German, economics, and the Russian state) whose overlap was fraught with tension. Following this, Ryazanov explores the logic of economics as a particular form of research. Again, we see the tension between foreign influence as higher status and a source of skills and knowledge for Russia and domestic political needs. Ryazanov begins by noting that economics has been torn between claims to universality (i.e. a method for seeking Truth outside historical experiences) and the influence of local historical experiences on the questions, methods, and aims. The creation of a national school of economics in Russia was not unique, and it was driven by the desires of state officials and intellectuals oriented to Russia itself (e.g. Slavophiles) to create a science that could address Russia s economic issues on its own terms, and without subordinating Russian intellectual thought to foreign fields. The influence of German economics not only as an intellectual effect in itself, but also as concrete actors bringing their own ideas to Russia becomes clear once again. However, Russian economists could apply new knowledge to their own context and create their own national school an economics attuned to their own institutions and political culture. Russian economics, like Russian identity, has been torn between affinity with Europe and sense of belonging to a European intellectual community, and a desire for status from uniqueness. Dmitriev sharpens the history of economics by examining how statistics, and a quantitative methodology more generally, took root in Russian economics. K. F. Hermann played an important role, revealing how actors with particular institutional capacities, skills, and capital can influence the operating logics of fields and discourses. Both British and German approaches were available, and ultimately the German approach won out in no small part because of Hermann and his colleagues. Statistics was not the inevitable core of economics methodology: Hermann had to make a case that statistics not only provided important data for the state, as well as economists, to have a true sense of the state of Russian economy and society; it was also a true form of science. Raskov turns our atten-

5 Fields of Discourses and Theory: Economics and Russia 25 tion to another individual, Nikolai Sieber, who played an important role in introducing Marx to Russian economics. In telling part of Sieber s story (drawn from a broader project on Sieber s life and work), Raskov problematizes the personal biography as more than one individual s personality, knowledge, and tastes rather, that biography is the sedimentation of experiences in different fields that the actor carriers forward. For Sieber, as for many young scholars, three fields of experience were important: the university setting as experiences of intellectual challenge, growth, and mentoring; travel abroad for purposes of study, and thus exposure to fields of intellectual discourse and practice different from those in Russia; and publication as a means for shaping discourses, raising one s status, and making a living. While Raskov guides us through part of Sieber s life, he is also guiding us through different field relations that came together through Sieber. The contradictions of tsarist political economy and emerging modernity (influenced in part by ideas from Europe, including Marxism) came to a head in the revolution of Markov provides a brief excursion through the institutional turmoil of that period, and how various facets of the field of economics were touched. The 1905 revolution was a complicated affair, and not even one book can do it justice, but Markov manages to reveal the challenges economists faced. Students challenged their authority on dual grounds: their institutional authority as professors and their cultural authority as carriers of knowledge. In terms of a field framework, the revolution challenged older rules of the value and legitimacy of capital, and economists cultural capital (particular theoretical and methodological knowledge) and social capital (institutional positions) no longer had the same value as before Melnik takes us to another case of institutional and field turmoil: high Stalinism after World War II. The Blockade of Leningrad had claimed more than one million victims and disrupted the work of economists, especially those at Leningrad State University. Adjusting to post-war life was its own challenge, but by 1948, the Leningrad Affair heralded a new wave of Stalinist repression aimed at Leningrad elites who led the city through the Blockade. Melnik takes us later to public discussions as a tool to discipline economists and professors to make sure their science did not challenge the authority of elite or ideology. The threat to power, it seemed, was local-level fields: a profes-

6 26 Fields of Discourses and Theory: Economics and Russia sion grounded in the search for Truth and intimately linked to Marxism Leninism, an institution (the university), and science as practice and identity that was supposed to transcend social reality. High Stalinism was not only a matter of a suspicious elite bent on rooting out possible competition; it had a complex dynamic that ran not only through institutions, but also through combinations of institutions that, in this case, came together in the university.