Ivan Boldyrev

Ernst Bloch and His Contemporaries is a much needed concise yet comprehensive overview of Ernst Bloch's early and later thought. It fills an important gap in research on the history of German thought in the 20th century by reconstructing the contexts of Bloch's philosophy, while focusing on his contemporaries - Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno. Ernst Bloch's influential ideas include his theory of utopian consciousness, his resolute inclination to merge aesthetics and politics, rehabilitation of hope, and atheistic conception of Christianity. Although Bloch's major early texts, Spirit of Utopia and Traces, have recently been translated into English, and there has been renewed interest in Bloch over the last 15 years, he is still relatively unknown compared to other left German-Jewish intellectuals. Ivan Boldyrev places Bloch's often enigmatic prose within contexts more familiar to English-speaking readers, and outlines the most important messages in Bloch's legacy still relevant today to European intellectual discourse, in particular aesthetics and philosophy of history.

Hegel’s philosophy has witnessed periods of revival and oblivion, at times considered to be an unrivalled and all-embracing system of thought, but often renounced with no less ardour. This book renews the dialogue with Hegel by looking at his legacy as a source of insight and judgement that helps us rethink contemporary economics. This book focuses on a concept of institution which is equally important for Hegel's political philosophy and for economic theory to date.

The key contributions of this Hegelian perspective on economics lead us to the synthesis of traditional approaches and new ideas gained in economic experiments and advanced by neuroeconomists, sociologists and cognitive scientists. The proper account of contemporary 'civil society' involves comprehending it as a historically evolving totality of individual minds, ideas and intersubjective structures that are mutually dependent, tied by recognitive relations, and assert themselves as a whole in the ongoing performative movement of 'objective spitit'. The ethics of recognition is paired with the ethics of associations that supports moral principles and gives them true, concrete universality.

This unusual constellation of seemingly remote fields suggests that Hegel, read in a pragmatist mode, anticipated the new theories and philosophies of extended mind, social cognition and performativity. By providing a new conceptual apparatus and reformulating the theory of institutions in the light of this new synthesis, this book claims to give new meaning both to Hegel as interpreted from today, and to the social sciences. Seen from this perspective, such phenomena as cooperation in games, personal identity or justice in the version of Amartya Sen's 'realization-focused comparisons' are reinscribed into the logic of institutional theory. This 'Hegel' clearly goes beyond the limits of philosophical discussion and becomes a decisive reference for economists, sociologists, political scientists and other scholars who study the foundations and consequences of human sociality and try to explore and design the institutions necessary for a worthy common life.

Утопия и утопическое сознание с давних пор находятся в центре политических дискуссий и художественных практик. Книга Ивана Болдырева посвящается Эрнсту Блоху, немецкому мыслителю, который придал этой теме особый философско-исторический статус и смог собрать под флагом утопии марксистский активизм, эсхатологическую метафизику и авангардное искусство. В книге представлена умственная развитие Блоха и прослежены его сложные и неоднозначные взаимоотношения с главнейшими философами XX в. - Георгом Лукачем, Вальтером Беньямином и Теодором Адорно. "Полемическая тотальность" этих взаимоотношений служит прояснению противоречивой логики утопического мессианизма. Книга предназначается философам, политологам, историкам и социологам.

Hegel’s poem Eleusis (1796) implies a paradox in trying to combine a critique of language as inadequate for expressing the Absolute with a plea for keeping a secret. Dialectics suggests that the secret is the poem itself in its performance. I show that Eleusis envisions a certain view of history that entails a pessimistic relation to actuality and a utopian longing for the new community of those who keep secrecy. Unearthing the Christian inspiration that drives the development of the main ideas to be found in Eleusis helps to demonstrate that it is on this community enacted by the poem that the secret of the Eleusinian mysteries and, generally, the destiny of the Absolute, would further depend. In an intersubjective and thus truly dialectical way the poem should open itself towards interpretations that could ruin its initial message. This fragility remains a distinctive feature of Hegel’s speculative poetry and lends it the hope of remaining a ‘secret as secret.’

Hegel investigated the limits of the social order envisaged by political economy, while admiring the universality of modernity. I ask how a series of tropes involved in this critique can illuminate its own limits, the nature and consequences of Hegel's engagement with political economy. The attempts to domesticate and re-integrate the economic, mostly associated with irrationality of the unconscious, turn out to be a failure, while the very logic of domestication has to follow the logic of the economic. The mutual recognition turns into a mutual mimicry, whose success presents a major threat to the speculative enterprise.

This paper reconstructs the ontology of finance as it is presented in Kenneth Arrow's general equilibrium model of contingent commodities. The fundamental notion of modern finance, 'Arrow securities' (paying one monetary unit contingent upon a certain future event and nothing otherwise) is considered an elementary Luhmannian code of the economic. The performative, self-implementing tendencies in general equilibrium analysis are reinterpreted in view of the joint risk design as conceived by Dirk Baecker. Creating new (markets for) risks to control the future can be, on the one hand, traced back/justified with reference to Arrow's world of contingent commodities and, on the other, rationalized as a way of adjusting the economic system and moving reality closer to its theoretical portrayal. I also associate the creation of the new 'risk structures' with the new overarching temporality inviting us to tame uncertainty and govern the future.

This paper delineates the main features of the Soviet mathematical economics by looking at its epistemic cultures and comparing it with the postwar American economics. Many general tendencies characteristic for the Western story were reproduced on the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain. In particular, both disciplines were increasingly mathematized, had a contested status within the political landscape in general and economics profession in particular, and were in part institutionally defined by the anti-Semitism in the academia (1950s in the USA, 1970s in the USSR). We further distinguish between the two groups of the Soviet mathematical economists: one more attached to the ’economic cybernetics’ movement, preoccupied with the optimization techniques, dealing mainly with the production sector and eventually hoping to improve centralized planning; and another group that was more comfortable with game theory and more open to standard mainstream vision of the economy. We further define more closely the institutional sites and disciplinary identities of the two subcultures and provide tentative answers to the question why, despite the excellent technical training and various overlaps with the comparable American case, Soviet mathematical economists failed to develop a sucessful and internationally competitive research programme.

Niklas Luhmann's (1927–1998) ambitious research project was aimed not only at describing society as a global social system, but it also analyzed various subsystems (including an economic one). The article assesses Luhmann's vision of the economy, summarized mainly in his Wirtschaft der Gesellschaft, wherein he addresses basic economic notions: the economic system, money, prices, rationality, and the market. I then interpret his ideas in the context of modern discussions in economics (intersubjective structures, complex systems, and evolutionary modeling). I also propose some heuristics implied by Luhmann's economic ontology, which are potentially interesting for methodological and theoretical strategies of modern economics.

In this article we tell the fascinating, yet rarely addressed, story of developments in general equilibrium theory in the Soviet Union during the 1970s through the lens of a single biography. The Soviet advances in mathematical economics, only fragmentarily known in the Western histo-riography of economics, give an occasion to reflect on the extension of the Walrasian paradigm to nonmarket societies, as well as on ideological effects of general equilibrium theory and its interpretations within a socialist framework. The success of general equilibrium theory that became a core of neo-classical economics after World War II (Weintraub 1985) might be, to a certain extent, attributed to the Cold War context (Mirowski 2002). The general equilibrium existence proof in a model of a perfectly competitive market as well as the theorems of welfare economics seemed, at least in popular accounts (such as journalistic interpretations of the Nobel Prize Weintraub was also invaluable. Kevin D. Hoover and two anonymous referees helped greatly in improving the style and some important details of the argument.

While the history of Cold War social and human sciences has become an immensely productive line of inquiry and has generated some exciting research, a lot remains still to be done in studying more deeply the known stories, venturing into the unknown ones and, in particular, looking in greater detail at the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain. In our expository introduction to this special issue, we demonstrate how its articles enhance our understanding of the postwar social and human sciences. The special issue invites us to rethink the role of the local intellectual and disciplinary contexts in the postwar cultures of knowledge; to pay more attention to the networks and institutions that fostered communication across the Iron Curtain; to trace various asymmetries at work in the divided academic world and the ambiguous status of many actors who enable the East–West contacts despite the general hostility and ideological cleavages; and finally to arrive at a more differentiated and complex view of the whole intellectual landscape in the history of social and human sciences opening up once all the Cold War protagonists, including the countries of the eastern bloc, are subject to a detailed study. This project, we believe, is worthwhile not just for the sake of historical accuracy but also for understanding and changing the societies we live in, which are often still contaminated by the maladies of the Cold War.

Research within the history of economic thought has focused only little on the development of economics under dictatorship. This paper attempts to show how a country with a relatively large and internationally established community of social scientists in the 1920s, the Soviet Union, was subjected to repression. We tell this story through the case of Isaak Il’ich Rubin, a prominent Russian economist and historian of economic thought, who in the late 1920s was denounced by rival scholars and repressed by the political system. By focusing not only on his life and work, but also on that of his opponents and institutional clashes, we show how the decline of a social science tradition in Russia and the USSR as well as the Stalinization of Soviet social sciences emerged as a process over time. We analyze the complex interplay of ideas, scholars, and their institutional context, and conclude that subsequent repression was arbitrary, suggesting that no clear survival or career strategy existed in the Stalinist system, due to a situation of fundamental uncertainty.

This article addresses some recent tendencies in economic methodology defined as a philosophy
of science for economics. I review the problem of normative/positive distinction in
methodology and argue that normativity in its past forms is intolerable today but is, at the
same time, indispensable for methodological inquiry. Using recent texts by Mirowski and
Nik-Khah and by Alexandrova and Northcott on the applications of auction theory as a
case study, I compare in more detail various approaches to economic methodology inspired
by the science and technology studies (STS) and philosophy of science literatures, respectively.
On the basis of this comparison, I show that the STS programme in economic methodology
may prove fruitful in the future, but there is still a place for more aprioristic
philosophical thinking. Methodology and history of economics also play a fundamental
role that goes beyond the descriptive analysis of STS and offer conceptual clarification
paired with normative concerns provided by philosophers of science.

В данной работе предлагается исследовать формальные методы современной экономической теории мейнстрима (которые являются единственным основанием объединения разнородных направлений теории под названием "мейнстрим") как некую языковую игру (Л. Витгенштейн) со своими правилами и принципами. Чтобы применить идеи позднего Витгенштейна и Ж.-Ф. Лиотара к анализу экономической науки, предпринимается попытка выделить основные правила конструирования теорий, используемые экономистами-неоклассиками в их работах. Рассматривается также специфический случай "аналитического марксизма"  в качестве "конфликта интерпретаций", неудачной попытки применить правила одной языковой игры к другой.

This paper reconstructs the ontology of finance as it is presented in Kenneth Arrow's general equilibrium model of contingent commodities. The fundamental notion of modern finance, 'Arrow securities' (paying one monetary unit contingent upon a certain future event and nothing otherwise) is considered an elementary Luhmannian code of the economic. The performative, self-implementing tendencies in general equilibrium analysis are reinterpreted in view of the joint risk design as conceived by Dirk Baecker. Creating new (markets for) risks to control the future can be, on the one hand, traced back/justified with reference to Arrow's world of contingent commodities and, on the other, rationalized as a way of adjusting the economic system and moving reality closer to its theoretical portrayal. I also associate the creation of the new 'risk structures' with the new overarching temporality inviting us to tame uncertainty and govern the future.