B14 - History of Economic Thought through 1925: Socialist; MarxistReturn

Bernard Bolzano was not merely a mathematician of the European format. He was also a critical social thinker whose work has distinct economic dimensions. This is why he rightly appears in the overviews of the beginnings of Czech economic thought. He began writing his work “About the Best State” 210 years ago, which made him the most famous Czech utopian. The half-forgotten Bolzano legacy, which is still alive and ahead of its time in many respects, recalls this text.

N. D. Kondratiev was a Russian economist and statistician. Although he was interested in planning theory, he became most famous for his modern approach to economic cycles, primarily long waves. Unfortunately, both his ideas about dynamics in economics, planning and cycles and his work for the Institute for Conjuncture are still underappreciated.

M. I. Tugan-Baranovsky was a Russian-Ukrainian economist, scientist, policy maker and journalist. He promoted the ideas of co-operativism. He tried to describe an eclectic synthesis of the marginal utility theory and the value theory of D. Ricardo and K. H. Marx. He is famous for the business cycle theory and he belongs among the best-known Russian economists.

Robert Owen was a British businessman, thinker, philanthropist, campaigner and reformer, who was looking non-violently for an alternative system. He is said to be a pioneer of socialism in Britain and a leader of the utopian socialist movement in the 19th century. He is also known as a predecessor of the cooperative movement. He tried to start a set of reforms, which were not followed.

The study deals with the question of how much the post-war development of Czechoslovakia was affected by the Nazi central control model and the theory of Marxism-Leninism. The study searches for an answer through analysis of two questions: Could a different economic concept have been applied at all? Was the theory of Marxism-Leninism internally consistent and was it strong enough to solve the post-war restoration tasks? The author reaches her conclusion that Czechoslovakia's transfer to socialism was not based on the Marxist theory as a peculiar economic theory offering a new control concept, but, contrary to that, she believes that the key circumstance of the transfer was the economy with central and mandatory control applied during the Nazi occupation. As a result of that type of economy, a highly concentrated capital was transferred to the government's hands as a nationalized industry at the end of the war.