The Internal Contradictions of Hungary

János Kornai is a highly distinguished, internationally prominent Hungarian economist who taught both at Harvard and Hungarian academic institutions for almost two decades. He has been showered with honors all over the world and his books translated into dozens of languages. For much of his life he lived under a communist political regime to which he was “rationally, morally, and emotionally opposed.” Beginning in the 1960s, under the rule of János Kádár, he achieved a peculiar coexistence with that regime, benefiting from its more permissive policies, which allowed him to travel abroad for extended periods of time. He avoided outright political involvements, but his writings had great political significance; they were groundbreaking studies demonstrating and documenting the incorrigible flaws and failures of socialist economic systems.