Main trends of research in the social and human ... - unesdoc - Unesco

288 Economics
quantitative relations valid for more than one socio-economic system. The log-
ical outcome of this excess of historicism was seen later in the well-known thesis
of Rosa Luxemburg and (especially) Bukharin that, with the fall of capitalism,
political economy would disappear. It was believed that the socialization of the
means of production would so simplify the national economy that theoretical
economic generalizations would be neither necessary nor possible. Marxism
thus paradoxically adopted towards socialism certain of the methodological
attitudes of the historical school which it had so resolutely opposed for their
anti-theory bias.
The alleged pointlessness of a political economy of socialism (a view which
lasted for decades), and the institutional conditions extremely unfavourable to
the development of sciences (social sciences in particular), explain the modesty
of the theoretical contributions of economists from the socialist countries until
the late fifties. The discussions of the early Soviet economists were brutally in-
terrupted by the Stalin apparatus during the period of the first five-year plan
and the collectivization of agriculture. These discussions usually started with
some practical economic difficulty, but often continued into generalizations that
sometimes contained theoretical insights.4 In view of the way in which these
discussions werecut short, it is difficult to say how far the thesis of the pointless-
ness of trying to build up a systematic theory of socialist economics prevented
the accumulation of elements that might have built up into a theory.
The first more general discussion of the nature of the political economy of
socialism did not begin until the early fifties. Its starting point was a popular
handbook produced by the USSR Academy of Sciences. From Stalin’s report,
the only one available, two opposing concepts were known to exist. The author
of Economic ProbIems of Socialism in the USSR did admittedly call for the crea-
tion of a new branch of political economy to study development constants in
socialist production, but he wanted at the same time to make an ideological use
of it in a way familiar since the publication of Frederic Bastiat’s Harmonies
dconomiques. The opposite concept was held by Yaroshenko. Forced to be con-
formist, he proposed ignoring the socio-economic problems, constructing a
theory of the rational organization of productive forces in a socialist society.
Each of the concepts, in its own way, was refusing to accord the status of a social
science to the political economy of socialism; Stalin’s prevented real scientific
research, Yaroshenko suggested excluding it from the family of the social sci-
ences. Thus neither concept allowed it past the pie-scientific stage.
Only in the second half of the fifties did real scientific discussion of socialist
economics begin. The results have been exceptionally fruitful, and especially so
in certain branches as, from the methodological point of view, the following
examples will suffice to show.
a. The wide and varied application of mathematics to practical econometric
and statistical investigation and to deductive theoretical studies enhanced pre-
cision in economic thinking. Economic research was freed of many myths and
dogmas. The reciprocal translation of categories in use by different schools of
economics was made possible.
b. The rejection, as being over-simplifications or even false, of such dichoto-