Programming the USSR: Leonid V. Kantorovich in context.

In the wake of Stalin's death, many Soviet scientists saw the opportunity to promote their methods as tools for the engineering of economic prosperity in the socialist state. The mathematician Leonid Kantorovich (1912-1986) was a key activist in academic politics that led to the increasing acceptance of what emerged as a new scientific persona in the Soviet Union. Rather than thinking of his work in terms of success or failure, we propose to see his career as exemplifying a distinct form of scholarship, as a partisan technocrat, characteristic of the Soviet system of knowledge production. Confronting the class of orthodox economists, many factors were at work, including Kantorovich's cautious character and his allies in the Academy of Sciences. Drawing on archival and oral sources, we demonstrate how Kantorovich, throughout his career, negotiated the relations between mathematics and economics, reinterpreted political and ideological frames, and reshaped the balance of power in the Soviet academic landscape.

Border cases between autonomy and relevance: Economic sciences in Berlin--A natural experiment.

The faculty of economics at today's Humboldt University in Berlin, as no other institution of economics, has witnessed three radical ruptures in its history: in 1933, National Socialism replaced the pluralism prevailing in the Weimar Republic by imposing a "German economics"; after WWII, GDR authorities replaced this NS regime by imposing a Marxist imperative, which after the fall of the wall was replaced by the Western standards of neoclassical economics. In reconstructing these three reforms, institutional history can serve as a context in which questions about the political nature of economic knowledge can be answered that remain speculative in a conceptual context. I thus present a natural experiment in the political epistemology of economics: How do economists respond to, resist, and stabilize, changing political regimes? How do economists renegotiate the autonomy of economic knowledge given changing demands as of its social task? Among others, I show that contrary to Robert Merton's old, but still widely held thesis in political epistemology-that the values of science are compatible only with democratic regimes-the totalitarian and authoritarian regimes created better conditions for methodological pluralism in economics than democratic society.