Bernard Chavance

Paris Cité University

On the occasion of Amartya Sen’s discussion of “Marx after Kornai” (Sen, 2021), the note evokes two questions in the work of János Kornai. The first is his attitude to normative assessment in conditions of conflict or tension between values, the second is his relation to Marx, with specific remarks about capitalism, inequalities and democracy.

It is a pleasure to introduce the discussion about the book ‘Engaging with János Kornai’s Scholarship’, which gives a glimpse of the variety of topics in his extensive life work. I shall focus on a theme that is underlined in the title and runs across most contributions, the system paradigm. Kornai’s contribution is essential and unique here. It co...

Le contraste entre la permanence du régime politique et la transformation profonde du système économique distingue l’histoire chinoise contemporaine de celle des pays post-socialistes d’Europe et d’ex-Union soviétique. Son origine réside en partie dans l’année 1989 et les deux chocs majeurs que subit le système politique du pays : l’un interne, la...

In the confrontation between the two main economic systems that has marked the twentieth century, capitalism has been declared the winner–by default– over its adversary, socialism. Today, establishing a market economy has become the primary goal of the formerly socialist countries. The history of economic reform helps explain this remarkable turnin...

For a long time, France was a country in which various approaches to economics coexisted. This pluralism began to dwindle in the mid-1990s. Since then, France has witnessed the increasing and now overwhelming domination of mainstream economics. This article, drawing on a study of the evolution of the recruitment of professors of economics in France...

János Kornai's book on capitalism, Dynamism, Rivalry, and the Surplus Economy, is summarized and discussed. While Kornai stresses innovation as a great virtue of capitalism, he also characterizes the system as a surplus economy, where excess capacity, surplus stocks and unemployment are normal phenomena. The situation is somewhat symmetrical to the...

The paper discusses John R. Commons's original theory of institutions, where the latter are defined as going concerns and their working rules, or collective action restraining and expanding individual action. Such organizational approach of institutions makes important contributions to institutional economics in general, through its notion of a hie...

The paper gives a critical assessment of the reaction of various trends of economics, when confronted with the diversified experience of postsocialist transformation and accompanying surprises, like the initial depression, the unexpected consequences of fast privatisation, or the unconventional policies and performance of China and Vietnam. It disc...

Vincent Barnett et Joachim Zweynert (éd.)Economics in Russia: Studies in intellectual history. Aldershot, Ashgate, 2008, XVIII-202 p. - Volume 64 Issue 3 - Bernard Chavance

This introduction to institutional economics, follows the history of the field since the early 20th century until the present day. It concentrates on influential authors in the main schools of institutional economics. Institutional economics is defined as economic thought that considers institutions to be relevant for economic theory, and consequen...

Diversity of trajectories of post-socialist transforming economies is a stylized fact of this experience of system change. The paper explores the relations between change in formal and informal rules in historical perspective, discussing new institutional views about rationality of formal institutions and detrimental inertia of informal institution...

Economic theories show signs of an «institutional turn» since the 1990s. The development of a new institutional economics has been complemented by the revival of original or classical institutional economics. The case of research on «institutions and performance», however, reveals the ambivalence of such a turn, partly diverted by the contemporary...

La transformation des économies postsocialistes a posé un défi d’interprétation et d’orientation aux théories économiques. La doctrine de la transition, approche dominante au cours des premières années, reposait sur l’hypothèse d’une convergence vers un modèle jugé normal de l’« économie de marché », tandis que les approches institutionnalistes déf...

The paper tries to assess the answers to the great challenge of post-socialism, by concentrating on the transition doctrine and on the institutionalist and evolutionary views. « Economics of transition » wer e a kind of convergence theory, that was soon criticised by institutionalis t and evolutionary theories. The latter have appeared more accurat...

The Regulation approach, developed for two decades by a group of French scholars, can be defined as an institutional and evolutionary research programme focused on economic change in a historical, theoretical and comparative perspective. The main works have been devoted to capitalist economies, but in the 1980s a number of contributions addressed t...

The notion of rules is common to the economics of organization and the economics of institutions. These two fields may find a better relation thanks to clearer conceptual distinctions on one hand, and to a more hierarchised systemic approach on the other hand. This may clarify somewhat debates among institutionalist approaches. The paper first disc...

The notion of rules is common to the economics of organization and the economics of institutions. The author analyses the concept of going concern by Commons, the spontaneous and organized order in Hayek's works, and North's distinction of formal and informal institutions. Comparing these three theories he proposes a synthetic and critical approach...

The three major themes of János Kornai's work reflected in the title of this book—planning, shortage, and transition, or transformation—figure prominently in the essays. The three major themes of János Kornai's work reflected in the title of this book—planning, shortage, and transition, or transformation—figure prominently in the essays. After a ph...

The beginning of the 1990s has been characterized by the predominance of an optimistic and naive rhetoric about convergence in the two halves of Europe. While in the West the prospect of a monetary union announced by the Maastricht treaty implied macro-economic convergence strictly defined through a number of tight criteria, the whole continent cel...

In Bernard Chavance, Éric Magnin, Ramine Motamed-Nejad, Jacques Sapir (dir.), Capitalisme et socialisme en perspective. Évolution et transformation des systèmes économiques, Paris, La Découverte, 1999. 11 ____________ Le capitalisme et le socialisme comme espèces systémiques : formation, co-évolution, transformation Bernard Chavance L'interaction e...

The hypothesis of convergence, interpreted as a univocal transition towards a market economy without adjective, i. e. as a determinist trend facing possible obstacles or delays, appears clearly wrong in the light of the experience of post-socialist economic change. The latter is rather a complex systemic transformation process marked by the emergen...

Le passage à l’économie de marché est aujourd’hui l’objectif majeur des pays ex-socialistes. Dans la confrontation des systèmes qui ont marqué le XXe siècle, le capitalisme est déclaré vainqueur par abandon – et conversion – de son adversaire. L’histoire des réformes économiques explique ce grand tournant. Les tentatives de perfectionnement du modè...

The process that began in Eastern Europe in 1989 and that has been showing no signs of abating is of unprecedented historical proportions. The political collapse of communist regimes occurred against a background of structural economic crisis. Furthermore, their fall was unexpectedly aided by Soviet perestrojka, which in turn had been primarily cau...

Jean Radvanyi, Violette Rey éds, Régions et pouvoirs régionaux en Europe de l'Est et en URSS, Paris, Masson, « Recherches en géographie », 1989, 192 p. - Volume 45 Issue 2 - Bernard Chavance

Analysis of socialist economic systems, and the regulation approach Regulation theory was developed in the field of advanced capitalist economies, and partly Third-world economies. During the 1980's, quite a few works influenced by the regulation school have been published in France, dealing with socialist economies, which are particularly prone t...

[fre] Les économies socialistes viennent de succomber à une crise d'adaptation, due à un manque de flexibilité systémique qui contraste avec celle qui a caractérisé les capita- lismes occidentaux. La transition où elles sont engagées ne doit pas être interprétée de manière finaliste, vu l'incertitude qui pèse sur les effets des déstructurations sys...

The political economy of Chinese reforms The reform of a socialist economy, especially if it is comprehensive or radical, should be understood as a long process of systemic change, as well as a process of social change with a potential redistribution of most places and powers in the economy and the society. The latter dimension is that of a politi...

[fre] Les réformes économiques dans les systèmes socialistes sont caractérisées depuis une trentaine d'années par leur nécessité et leur difficulté. Définies comme des projets de changement intra-systémique visant une évolution significative du mode de régulation et de croissance, à travers l'extension des relations horizontales et la réduction des...

Jean L. Cohen, Class and Civil Society : The Limits of Marxian Critical Theory, Amherst, The University of Massachusetts Press, 1982, XIII-264 p. - Volume 42 Issue 2 - Bernard Chavance

The long term tendency of a decline in growth that appeared during the beginning of the sixties, revealed itself very openly in the middle of the seventies, and ended by emerging as a genuine economic crisis in the beginning of the eighties. Apart from the extreme cases of Poland (with its acute social crisis) and Romania, the whole region is confr...

dans la société telle qu'elle est, nous ne trouvions pas masquées les conditions matérielles de production d'une société sans classes et les rapports d'échange qui leur correspondent, toutes les tentatives de la faire exploser ne seraient que donquichottisme.» 1 Dans la Postface au Capital, Marx distingue la dialectique sous sa «forme mystifiée,» o...

The Soviet ideological formation of the Stalin period was closely linked with the class struggles and the economic and social transformations of that period. This article examines two major themes running through the some times contradictory ideology of Stalinism: 1) “state socialism” as a political ide ology, and 2) the “socialist mode of producti...

Paul Sweezy's position as set forth in a recent article ( Monthly Review, March 1976) can be summarized as follows: (1) exploitation is a dominant phenomenon in the Soviet Union; (2) the ruling stratum of Soviet society is an exploiting class; (3) this class cannot be described as a capitalist class, any more than the Soviet Union can be characteri...

Les quinze années écoulées depuis le début de la tansformation post-socialiste ont représenté une expérience historique unique de changement organisationnel, institutionnel et systémique dans un grand nombre de pays. Cette expérience inachevée a constitué un défi considérable pour l'interprétation et l'orientation d'un processus extraordinaire et s...