Abstract

The article analyzes the methodological aspects of the shortage economy theory by the Hungarian economist János Kornai. The purpose of the study is to show the significance of his ideas for Sovietology and social science in general. Kornai explores such a poorly researched area of the socialist economy as the commodity shortage. To cover it, he coins a new categorical apparatus (“forced substitution”, “soft budget constraint”, “hard budget constraint”, etc.), operates with rarely used terms or puts new content into familiar terms. Kornai’s theory is compared with the theory of the Soviet academician Stanislav G. Strumilin, the designer of “teleological planning” and supporter of power and ideological methods of socio-economic management. Despite the fact that these theories belong to different eras and reflect different realities, their comparison allows us to trace not only the evolution of the “political economy of socialism”, but also the evolution of the society they described. The article also examines such issues as the degree of contiguity of the methodology used by Kornai to the Marxist one; the problems solved and unsolved by him; the ideological prerequisites that contributed to his transition to the free-market supporters’ camp; the relevance of Kornai’s theory in the post-Soviet period. According to the author of the article, the scientist managed to uncover the patterns of those social trends that the official Soviet “political economy of socialism” ignored, but he did not avoid the one-sidedness of his conclusions, which was a step towards the ideology of “market romanticism” of the 1990s. It is concluded that the ideas of Kornai represent a late version of the “political economy of socialism”, but at the same time they contain elements of the opposite doctrine – the “political economy of capitalism”. In this regard, it can be said that the theory of the Hungarian economist sums up the Soviet “political economy of socialism” and opens a new paradigm of social studies of post-Soviet society.