By Force of Thought

Janos Kornai, a distinguished Hungarian economist, began his adult life as an ardent believer in socialism and then became a critic of the communist political and economic system. He lost family members in the Holocaust, contributed to the ideological preparation for the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, and became an influential theorist of the post-Soviet economic transition. He has been a journalist, a researcher prohibited from teaching in his home country, and a tenured professor at Harvard. "By Force of Thought" traces Kornai`s lifelong intellectual journey and offers a subjective complement to his academic research.Disenchanted with communism, Kornai published "Overcentralization" (1959), the first book written by someone living behind the Iron Curtain to be openly critical of Soviet-style economics. Kornai went on to publish the controversial "Anti-Equilibrium" (1971), "Economics of Shortage" (1980), "The Road to a Free Economy" (1990), and the summary of his lifetime research, "The Socialist System" (1992). Kornai`s memoir describes his research as well as the social and political environments in which he did his work. The difficulties faced by a critic of central planning in a communist country are made especially vivid by material from newly opened secret police files and informers` reports on his activities.