János Kornai

The Joys and Woes of a Researcher

 

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Let us move on. The research is done. The next phase is to publish it. It is a proud, joyous feeling when your work comes out, and you have the printed article or book in your hand. An author of a newly published work has something of the joy felt by a mother in her newborn child. But there are previous phases as well, and these are not easy to endure.
Let me mention first the historical period in which we authors were subject to pressure from the Communist political regime. Those whose message had a political content faced a difficult dilemma. What forum of publication should they choose? The more critical their work and the deeper it delved into the fundamental attributes of the socialist system, the stronger the dilemma became. If they were intent on telling the whole truth, they could only use illegal channels of publication. If they chose those, they laid themselves open to persecution, of themselves and possibly of their readers. Certainly, each samizdat publication reached relatively few readers, and illegal “flying university” lectures were attended by relatively few listeners. In addition, there were the torments of harassment or even incarceration, and a general feeling of isolation.
The other alternative—which I chose in the years of repression—was to devise writings intended for legal publication. But that meant undertaking selfcensorship in the interests of legality. I always insisted on writing only the truth, but I had to accept that I could not write the whole truth if I wanted my work to see legal publication. I refrained in the late 1970s and early 1980s of stating in Economics of Shortage that the ultimate explanation for the dysfunctional attributes of the socialist system lies in the political structure, the autocracy of the Communist Party, and the political activity and institutional system suggested by official Marxist-Leninist ideology.
Self-censorship is a demeaning torment. The only comfort is that for the price of it, you can put some recognised truth into many people’s hands. Economics of Shortage was read by several tens of thousands in Eastern Europe and sold a hundred thousand copies in China. Was that a comfort? Yes and no. It is a good feeling repeatedly to meet people in China or Russia, or here in Poland, who tell me the book opened their eyes. And it is an ineradicable woe to think how much of what I wanted to say had to stay inside me in those days, when I wrote the book.
Let me add for completeness that there is a special feeling of pleasure associated with self-censorship. What was the cleverest way to evade the censors and eagle-eyed editors and watchful supervisors at party headquarters? How could I smuggle in a message between the lines? How could I write 22 chapters of Economics of Shortage so that a reader with a quick ear could guess right away the contents of the missing 23rd and 24th chapters? That cat-and-mouse game provides an intellectual enjoyment well known to writers, poets and social scientists under all sorts of dictatorship.

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János Kornai
is Allie S. Freed Professor of Economics Emeritus at Harvard University.
After his appointment in 1986 as Professor of Economics at Harvard University until his
retirement in 2002 he divided his time between Cambridge, Massachussets and Budapest,
Hungary, where he was a research professor at the Institute of Economics of the
Hungarian Academy of Sciences till 1992, when he became an emeritus fellow of
Collegium Budapest Institute for Advanced Study. His books include Overcentralization of
Economic Administration (1959); Anti-Equilibrium (1971); Economics of Shortage (1980);
perhaps his most influential work; The Socialist System. The Political Economy of
Communism (1992); The Road to a Free Economy (1989); Struggle and Hope (1997) and
Welfare, Choice and Solidarity in Transition: Reforming the Health Sector in Eastern
Europe (2001), co-authored by Karen Eggleston. On June 19, 2008 János Kornai became
an Honorary Doctor of the Cracow University of Economics, the 14th honorary doctorate
he has received. This is the address he gave on the occasion.