In diesem Buch wird Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes als ein literarischer Text gedeutet, der se... more In diesem Buch wird Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes als ein literarischer Text gedeutet, der seine Überzeugungskraft aus der Lektüre anderer Texte schöpft. Untersucht werden die politischen und ästhetischen Konsequenzen dieser Interpretation. Das dialektische Philosophieren ist ein Bedürfnis, die vergangenen Gedankensysteme – die Texte – in ihrer eigenen Logik als mangelhafte aufzuweisen und zu überwinden, um dadurch die letzte spekulative Synthese zu etablieren. Aber dieselbe Operation macht – so die Hauptthese des Buches – das Spekulative selbst verwundbar, das damit in seiner unselbständigen Verfassung und in seinem Scheitern aufgewiesen wird. Die im Buch dargestellten Gesten des Anleihens und der Affinität sind nicht nur für Hegels Stil prägend. Sie können auch das Dialektische selber neu bestimmen – als eine verschwindende, fast unmögliche Stimme, eine Bemühung, aus der Verschränkung unvereinbarer, konfligierender Diskurse einen Sinn zu gewinnen.
Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2019
While the development of economics in the U.S. during the Cold War has been subject to many studi... more While the development of economics in the U.S. during the Cold War has been subject to many studies, scholars from various disciplines have only recently begun exploring the other kind of economics during the same period: the economics in the Soviet Union and other socialist countries. “Economic Knowledge in Socialism, 1945–1989” represents an exemplary cross-disciplinary effort for better understanding various domains of economic knowledge and, more broadly, the social sciences in the Eastern bloc. The variety of approaches, including history of ideas, oral history, anthropology, sociology, and the wealth of subjects from mathematical economics to the science of labor, from systems science to Marxist political economy, make this a fascinating read for those interested not only in the history of economics, but also in Soviet and Eastern European history, history of Marxism and socialism, international relations, and sociology of science. The papers explore the entanglement of ideology and economic discourse, the political dimensions of cybernetic technocracy, and the various faces of Cold War rationality in socialism. Together they present a rich picture of the epistemic cultures of economists responding to, resisting, and stabilizing socialist regimes.
In this book, sociologists, philosophers, and economists investigate the conceptual issues around... more In this book, sociologists, philosophers, and economists investigate the conceptual issues around the performativity of economics over a variety of disciplinary contexts and provide new case studies illuminating this phenomenon. In featuring the latest contributions to the performativity debate the book revives discussion of the fundamental questions: What precise meaning can we attribute to the notion of performativity? What empirical evidence can help us recognize economics as performative? And what consequences does performativity have for contemporary societies? The contributions demonstrate how performativity can serve as a powerful conceptual resource in dealing with economic knowledge, as an inspiring framework for investigating performative practices, and as an engine of discovery for thinking of the economic proper.
Ernst Bloch and His Contemporaries is a much needed concise yet comprehensive overview of Ernst B... more Ernst Bloch and His Contemporaries is a much needed concise yet comprehensive overview of Ernst Bloch's early and later thought. It fills an important gap in research on the history of German thought in the 20th century by reconstructing the contexts of Bloch's philosophy, while focusing on his contemporaries - Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno. Ernst Bloch's influential ideas include his theory of utopian consciousness, his resolute inclination to merge aesthetics and politics, rehabilitation of hope, and atheistic conception of Christianity. Although Bloch's major early texts, Spirit of Utopia and Traces, have recently been translated into English, and there has been renewed interest in Bloch over the last 15 years, he is still relatively unknown compared to other left German-Jewish intellectuals. Ivan Boldyrev places Bloch's often enigmatic prose within contexts more familiar to English-speaking readers, and outlines the most important messages in Bloch's legacy still relevant today to European intellectual discourse, in particular aesthetics and philosophy of history.
Hegel’s philosophy has witnessed periods of revival and oblivion, at times considered to be an un... more Hegel’s philosophy has witnessed periods of revival and oblivion, at times considered to be an unrivalled and all-embracing system of thought, but often renounced with no less ardour. This book renews the dialogue with Hegel by looking at his legacy as a source of insight and judgement that helps us rethink contemporary economics. This book focuses on a concept of institution which is equally important for Hegel's political philosophy and for economic theory to date.
The key contributions of this Hegelian perspective on economics lead us to the synthesis of traditional approaches and new ideas gained in economic experiments and advanced by neuroeconomists, sociologists and cognitive scientists. The proper account of contemporary 'civil society' involves comprehending it as a historically evolving totality of individual minds, ideas and intersubjective structures that are mutually dependent, tied by recognitive relations, and assert themselves as a whole in the ongoing performative movement of 'objective spitit'. The ethics of recognition is paired with the ethics of associations that supports moral principles and gives them true, concrete universality.
This unusual constellation of seemingly remote fields suggests that Hegel, read in a pragmatist mode, anticipated the new theories and philosophies of extended mind, social cognition and performativity. By providing a new conceptual apparatus and reformulating the theory of institutions in the light of this new synthesis, this book claims to give new meaning both to Hegel as interpreted from today, and to the social sciences. Seen from this perspective, such phenomena as cooperation in games, personal identity or justice in the version of Amartya Sen's 'realization-focused comparisons' are reinscribed into the logic of institutional theory. This 'Hegel' clearly goes beyond the limits of philosophical discussion and becomes a decisive reference for economists, sociologists, political scientists and other scholars who study the foundations and consequences of human sociality and try to explore and design the institutions necessary for a worthy common life.
Утопия и утопическое сознание с давних пор находятся в центре политических дискуссий и художестве... more Утопия и утопическое сознание с давних пор находятся в центре политических дискуссий и художественных практик. Книга Ивана Болдырева посвящается Эрнсту Блоху, немецкому мыслителю, который придал этой теме особый философско-исторический статус и смог собрать под флагом утопии марксистский активизм, эсхатологическую метафизику и авангардное искусство. В книге представлена умственная развитие Блоха и прослежены его сложные и неоднозначные взаимоотношения с главнейшими философами XX в. - Георгом Лукачем, Вальтером Беньямином и Теодором Адорно. "Полемическая тотальность" этих взаимоотношений служит прояснению противоречивой логики утопического мессианизма. Книга предназначается философам, политологам, историкам и социологам.
What are the effects of authoritarian regimes on scholarly research in economics? And how might e... more What are the effects of authoritarian regimes on scholarly research in economics? And how might economic theory survive ideological pressures? The article addresses these questions by focusing on the mathematization of economics over the past century and drawing on the history of Soviet science. Mathematics in the USSR remained internationally competitive and generated many ideas that were taken up and played important roles in economic theory. These same ideas, however, were disregarded or adopted only in piecemeal fashion by Soviet economists, despite the efforts of influential scholars to change the economic research agenda. The article draws this contrast into sharper focus by exploring the work of Soviet mathematicians in optimization, game theory, and probability theory that was used in Western economics. While the intellectual exchange across the Iron Curtain did help advance the formal modeling apparatus, economics could only thrive in an intellectually open environment absent under the Soviet rule.
This article tells the story of the first international topological conference in Moscow (1935), ... more This article tells the story of the first international topological conference in Moscow (1935), an outstanding event that, for the first time, brought together the most notable American, European, and Soviet mathematicians, including those who would later play decisive roles in the mathematization of economics: John von Neumann, Leonid Kantorovich, and Albert W. Tucker. The fact that Kantorovich was in contact with von Neumann and his closest colleagues, Solomon Lefschetz and Garrett Birkhoff, is hardly appreciated in the histories of mathematics and mathematical economics. Their brief academic exchange was interrupted by the increasing international isolation of Soviet mathematics and by the wars that ensued. The article provides a historical account of the conference and traces the intellectual and personal affinities of Soviet and non-Soviet mathematicians, as well as their conceptual innovations. It argues that the conference, as a singular event linking several research communities, mattered for the development of various formal frameworks and their dissemination, contributing to the intellectual landscape in which postwar mathematical economics could emerge. The article calls for a deeper analysis of conceptual affinities and motivations in applying mathematics to economics and for a more nuanced narrative linking these motivations to social and political contexts of economic modeling.
Ernst Bloch (1885-1977) was a German philosopher and cultural critic who is mostly credited for r... more Ernst Bloch (1885-1977) was a German philosopher and cultural critic who is mostly credited for renewing the interest in utopia and for mediating between the radical philosophy of emancipation, non-dogmatic religious thought, analysis of mass culture, and new aesthetic forms, notably those of Expressionism. His books, especially The Principle of Hope (1954-1959), contributed to a particular form of critical theory and, being written in a peculiar essayistic style, made him quite popular both in academic and non-academic circles. Bloch was an important voice among the intelligentsia of Weimar Germany and then, for a short period after the Second World war, the leading philosopher of the Eastern Germany. However, he quickly became a "deviator" for the Marxist ideologists. Beyond the Eastern bloc, he made a profound impact on utopian studies, theology, and aesthetics of the previous century, but also, generally, on political philosophy and critical theory. Bloch's leftist orientation and the optimistic account of hope made him a critic of existentialist thought, despite many genealogical and stylistic affinities to it. Basing on Hegel and Marx, but also drawing on many other intellectual traditions, Bloch sought to formulate the ontology and political philosophy for uncertain and open-ended world. This was reflected in his "utopian hermeneutics" seeking to uncover the unfinishedness, the "not yet" in any phenomenon of nature or culture; in his sensitivity to the immediacy of human existence (inspired, in part, by the phenomenological movement) and to the various forms of mass culture; and in his attempts to reformulate Marxism as an utopian project of humanization of nature/naturalization of humans. The experience of utopian non-identity is elevated to the level of the ontological principle: "S is not yet P", and the human quest for emancipation is grounded in the unfulfilled state of being itself.
In: I. Boldyrev and S. Stein (eds.). Interpreting Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Expositions and Critique of Contemporary Readings (pp. 260-271). L. and N. Y.: Routledge., 2021
It is curious that Hegel's Phenomenology, a text that explicitly embraces philosophy as a system ... more It is curious that Hegel's Phenomenology, a text that explicitly embraces philosophy as a system and aims to “sublate” the thinking of representation, ends with a literary image borrowed from Schiller's poetry. Many authors have tried to come to terms with this issue. This chapter contextualizes Hegel's editing work on what he quoted—for he both paraphrased and misquoted Schiller's text—and contrasts several interpretations of these interventions. While Robert Pippin uses this editing work to argue that Hegel's citation practices follow the speculative logic of/as accommodation and transformation, John McCumber, Rebecca Comay, and Katrin Pahl show in various ways how a series of shifts made by Hegel in misquoting Schiller imply both the resistance of literary imagery to dialectical appropriation and the possibility that his optimistic speculative project would fall apart. Together, these readings demonstrate how differently Hegel's phenomenological project can be judged and interpreted today in its relation to literature and history, as a totalizing system or a precarious enterprise. It also shows how a more detailed reading, which builds on these interpretive efforts, could reveal closer—and broad sweeping—affinities between Hegel and Schiller, both in their speculation and punctuation.
In the postwar USSR, there were a few scattered research groups engaged in research most closely ... more In the postwar USSR, there were a few scattered research groups engaged in research most closely resembling “Western” mainstream economics. Inspired by the new sciences of the artificial, these groups were able to make important contributions to various fields of economic theory. This article focuses on the story of one group created by the control engineer Mark Aizerman at the Institute of Control Sciences in Moscow. It discusses the origins and the outstanding diversity and dynamics of the group’s research agenda, reconstructs the factors that made Aizerman turn from the cybernetics of mechanical or biological systems to the abstract theory of choice and rationality, and demonstrates how the group was related to—and communicated with—the scholars doing work in social choice, mechanism design, and formal political theory. It also speculates on one missed research opportunity of doing experimental economics—something that, given the ideological and intellectual constraints Aizerman was facing, was hardly possible in the Soviet context, but could have been a synthesis of economics and engineering. The article also discusses a research culture Aizerman created and nurtured in his lab by encouraging research collaboration, sharing ideas, and freely moving across various disciplines.
M. Bykova and K. R. Westphal (eds.) The Palgrave Hegel Handbook (pp. 409-424). , 2020
In this chapter, I demonstrate that in his philosophy of ‘objective spirit’ Hegel was dealing wit... more In this chapter, I demonstrate that in his philosophy of ‘objective spirit’ Hegel was dealing with the problems that still preoccupy economic and social theory today. His starting points, an individual inhabiting capitalist economy, and this economy with its swift modernization and growing sophistication of needs and techniques, remind of—but surely do not coincide with—the basic presuppositions of current economic thinking. The new social form envisaged by Hegel, known under the name of ‘civil society,’ was, however, conceived as requiring a remedy to the phenomena it comprised: to the increasing atomization and isolation of human particularities and to the unrestrained self-seeking, the consequences of which were unemployment and pauperization. Homo oeconomicus had to be integrated into the more overwhelming cooperative framework of concrete universality—the state as actualized freedom. This general normative and political task in Hegel’s practical philosophy is paired with certain explanatory strategies that, I argue, play the major role in understanding the ‘objective spirit’ as a system of institutions. These ontological and heuristic principles include: continuity between physicality of individual action and sociality of institutional structures externalizing the inner; performativity implying that the spirit is a dynamic teleological embodiment of itself, its own becoming, revealing the meaning of its parts only in realization; and recognition designating the social bond and the struggle underlying the institutional edifice of modernity. Hence, not merely Hegel’s policy proposals aimed at limiting poverty and unemployment are familiar to modern economists. His institutional theory involves the challenges to and tensions of economic theorizing as it is practiced right now. Examples I draw upon are theories of social preferences, economic psychology of preferences as actions, and the suggestions to revive the notion of habit (so prominent in Hegel) as the very substance of institutional reality. Given the recent upsurge of institutional economics, these concurrences imply the lasting relevance of Hegel’s methodological and political perspectives and the need to re-integrate them as a classical foundation into any economic science to come.
Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics, 2019
The Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics (EJPE) interviewed Vogl about his intellectual c... more The Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics (EJPE) interviewed Vogl about his intellectual career, his relationship to the history and philosophy of economics, and his perspective on the analysis of contemporary capitalism.
Hegel’s poem Eleusis (1796) implies a paradox in trying to combine a critique of language as inad... more Hegel’s poem Eleusis (1796) implies a paradox in trying to combine a critique of language as inadequate for expressing the Absolute with a plea for keeping a secret. Dialectics suggests that the secret is the poem itself in its performance. I show that Eleusis envisions a certain view of history that entails a pessimistic relation to actuality and a utopian longing for the new community of those who keep secrecy. Unearthing the Christian inspiration that drives the development of the main ideas to be found in Eleusis helps to demonstrate that it is on this community enacted by the poem that the secret of the Eleusinian mysteries and, generally, the destiny of the Absolute, would further depend. In an intersubjective and thus truly dialectical way the poem should open itself towards interpretations that could ruin its initial message. This fragility remains a distinctive feature of Hegel’s speculative poetry and lends it the hope of remaining a ‘secret as secret.’
Economic methodologists most often study the relations between models and reality
while focusing ... more Economic methodologists most often study the relations between models and reality while focusing on the issues of the model’s epistemic relevance in terms of its relation to the ‘real world’ and representing the real world in a model. We complement the discussion by bringing the model’s constructive mechanisms or self-implementing technologies in play. By this, we mean the elements of the economic model that are aimed at ‘implementing’ it by envisaging the ways to change the reality in order to bring it more in line with the model. We are thus concerned mainly not with the ways to change the model to ‘fit’ the reality, but rather with the model’s own armature that is supposed to transform the world along theoretical lines. The case we study is Arrow– Debreu–McKenzie general equilibrium model. In particular, we show the following: gradient methods and stability could be regarded as constructive mechanisms of general equilibrium modeling in the context of market socialism debates; the obsession of general equilibrium theorists with these concepts can be partly explained by the fact that they hoped not to be faithful to reality, but rather to adjust it to fit the theoretical model; mechanism design theory initiated by the stability theorist Leonid Hurwicz could be seen as a successor of this position. We conclude by showing the relevance of this analysis for epistemic culture of much of contemporary economics and hence, claim that it is an important complement to the traditional philosophy of economic modeling.
Hegel investigated the limits of the social order envisaged by political economy, while admiring ... more Hegel investigated the limits of the social order envisaged by political economy, while admiring the universality of modernity. I ask how a series of tropes involved in this critique can illuminate its own limits, the nature and consequences of Hegel's engagement with political economy. The attempts to domesticate and re-integrate the economic, mostly associated with irrationality of the unconscious, turn out to be a failure, while the very logic of domestication has to follow the logic of the economic. The mutual recognition turns into a mutual mimicry, whose success presents a major threat to the speculative enterprise.
In diesem Buch wird Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes als ein literarischer Text gedeutet, der se... more In diesem Buch wird Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes als ein literarischer Text gedeutet, der seine Überzeugungskraft aus der Lektüre anderer Texte schöpft. Untersucht werden die politischen und ästhetischen Konsequenzen dieser Interpretation. Das dialektische Philosophieren ist ein Bedürfnis, die vergangenen Gedankensysteme – die Texte – in ihrer eigenen Logik als mangelhafte aufzuweisen und zu überwinden, um dadurch die letzte spekulative Synthese zu etablieren. Aber dieselbe Operation macht – so die Hauptthese des Buches – das Spekulative selbst verwundbar, das damit in seiner unselbständigen Verfassung und in seinem Scheitern aufgewiesen wird. Die im Buch dargestellten Gesten des Anleihens und der Affinität sind nicht nur für Hegels Stil prägend. Sie können auch das Dialektische selber neu bestimmen – als eine verschwindende, fast unmögliche Stimme, eine Bemühung, aus der Verschränkung unvereinbarer, konfligierender Diskurse einen Sinn zu gewinnen.
Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2019
While the development of economics in the U.S. during the Cold War has been subject to many studi... more While the development of economics in the U.S. during the Cold War has been subject to many studies, scholars from various disciplines have only recently begun exploring the other kind of economics during the same period: the economics in the Soviet Union and other socialist countries. “Economic Knowledge in Socialism, 1945–1989” represents an exemplary cross-disciplinary effort for better understanding various domains of economic knowledge and, more broadly, the social sciences in the Eastern bloc. The variety of approaches, including history of ideas, oral history, anthropology, sociology, and the wealth of subjects from mathematical economics to the science of labor, from systems science to Marxist political economy, make this a fascinating read for those interested not only in the history of economics, but also in Soviet and Eastern European history, history of Marxism and socialism, international relations, and sociology of science. The papers explore the entanglement of ideology and economic discourse, the political dimensions of cybernetic technocracy, and the various faces of Cold War rationality in socialism. Together they present a rich picture of the epistemic cultures of economists responding to, resisting, and stabilizing socialist regimes.
In this book, sociologists, philosophers, and economists investigate the conceptual issues around... more In this book, sociologists, philosophers, and economists investigate the conceptual issues around the performativity of economics over a variety of disciplinary contexts and provide new case studies illuminating this phenomenon. In featuring the latest contributions to the performativity debate the book revives discussion of the fundamental questions: What precise meaning can we attribute to the notion of performativity? What empirical evidence can help us recognize economics as performative? And what consequences does performativity have for contemporary societies? The contributions demonstrate how performativity can serve as a powerful conceptual resource in dealing with economic knowledge, as an inspiring framework for investigating performative practices, and as an engine of discovery for thinking of the economic proper.
Ernst Bloch and His Contemporaries is a much needed concise yet comprehensive overview of Ernst B... more Ernst Bloch and His Contemporaries is a much needed concise yet comprehensive overview of Ernst Bloch's early and later thought. It fills an important gap in research on the history of German thought in the 20th century by reconstructing the contexts of Bloch's philosophy, while focusing on his contemporaries - Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno. Ernst Bloch's influential ideas include his theory of utopian consciousness, his resolute inclination to merge aesthetics and politics, rehabilitation of hope, and atheistic conception of Christianity. Although Bloch's major early texts, Spirit of Utopia and Traces, have recently been translated into English, and there has been renewed interest in Bloch over the last 15 years, he is still relatively unknown compared to other left German-Jewish intellectuals. Ivan Boldyrev places Bloch's often enigmatic prose within contexts more familiar to English-speaking readers, and outlines the most important messages in Bloch's legacy still relevant today to European intellectual discourse, in particular aesthetics and philosophy of history.
Hegel’s philosophy has witnessed periods of revival and oblivion, at times considered to be an un... more Hegel’s philosophy has witnessed periods of revival and oblivion, at times considered to be an unrivalled and all-embracing system of thought, but often renounced with no less ardour. This book renews the dialogue with Hegel by looking at his legacy as a source of insight and judgement that helps us rethink contemporary economics. This book focuses on a concept of institution which is equally important for Hegel's political philosophy and for economic theory to date.
The key contributions of this Hegelian perspective on economics lead us to the synthesis of traditional approaches and new ideas gained in economic experiments and advanced by neuroeconomists, sociologists and cognitive scientists. The proper account of contemporary 'civil society' involves comprehending it as a historically evolving totality of individual minds, ideas and intersubjective structures that are mutually dependent, tied by recognitive relations, and assert themselves as a whole in the ongoing performative movement of 'objective spitit'. The ethics of recognition is paired with the ethics of associations that supports moral principles and gives them true, concrete universality.
This unusual constellation of seemingly remote fields suggests that Hegel, read in a pragmatist mode, anticipated the new theories and philosophies of extended mind, social cognition and performativity. By providing a new conceptual apparatus and reformulating the theory of institutions in the light of this new synthesis, this book claims to give new meaning both to Hegel as interpreted from today, and to the social sciences. Seen from this perspective, such phenomena as cooperation in games, personal identity or justice in the version of Amartya Sen's 'realization-focused comparisons' are reinscribed into the logic of institutional theory. This 'Hegel' clearly goes beyond the limits of philosophical discussion and becomes a decisive reference for economists, sociologists, political scientists and other scholars who study the foundations and consequences of human sociality and try to explore and design the institutions necessary for a worthy common life.
Утопия и утопическое сознание с давних пор находятся в центре политических дискуссий и художестве... more Утопия и утопическое сознание с давних пор находятся в центре политических дискуссий и художественных практик. Книга Ивана Болдырева посвящается Эрнсту Блоху, немецкому мыслителю, который придал этой теме особый философско-исторический статус и смог собрать под флагом утопии марксистский активизм, эсхатологическую метафизику и авангардное искусство. В книге представлена умственная развитие Блоха и прослежены его сложные и неоднозначные взаимоотношения с главнейшими философами XX в. - Георгом Лукачем, Вальтером Беньямином и Теодором Адорно. "Полемическая тотальность" этих взаимоотношений служит прояснению противоречивой логики утопического мессианизма. Книга предназначается философам, политологам, историкам и социологам.
What are the effects of authoritarian regimes on scholarly research in economics? And how might e... more What are the effects of authoritarian regimes on scholarly research in economics? And how might economic theory survive ideological pressures? The article addresses these questions by focusing on the mathematization of economics over the past century and drawing on the history of Soviet science. Mathematics in the USSR remained internationally competitive and generated many ideas that were taken up and played important roles in economic theory. These same ideas, however, were disregarded or adopted only in piecemeal fashion by Soviet economists, despite the efforts of influential scholars to change the economic research agenda. The article draws this contrast into sharper focus by exploring the work of Soviet mathematicians in optimization, game theory, and probability theory that was used in Western economics. While the intellectual exchange across the Iron Curtain did help advance the formal modeling apparatus, economics could only thrive in an intellectually open environment absent under the Soviet rule.
This article tells the story of the first international topological conference in Moscow (1935), ... more This article tells the story of the first international topological conference in Moscow (1935), an outstanding event that, for the first time, brought together the most notable American, European, and Soviet mathematicians, including those who would later play decisive roles in the mathematization of economics: John von Neumann, Leonid Kantorovich, and Albert W. Tucker. The fact that Kantorovich was in contact with von Neumann and his closest colleagues, Solomon Lefschetz and Garrett Birkhoff, is hardly appreciated in the histories of mathematics and mathematical economics. Their brief academic exchange was interrupted by the increasing international isolation of Soviet mathematics and by the wars that ensued. The article provides a historical account of the conference and traces the intellectual and personal affinities of Soviet and non-Soviet mathematicians, as well as their conceptual innovations. It argues that the conference, as a singular event linking several research communities, mattered for the development of various formal frameworks and their dissemination, contributing to the intellectual landscape in which postwar mathematical economics could emerge. The article calls for a deeper analysis of conceptual affinities and motivations in applying mathematics to economics and for a more nuanced narrative linking these motivations to social and political contexts of economic modeling.
Ernst Bloch (1885-1977) was a German philosopher and cultural critic who is mostly credited for r... more Ernst Bloch (1885-1977) was a German philosopher and cultural critic who is mostly credited for renewing the interest in utopia and for mediating between the radical philosophy of emancipation, non-dogmatic religious thought, analysis of mass culture, and new aesthetic forms, notably those of Expressionism. His books, especially The Principle of Hope (1954-1959), contributed to a particular form of critical theory and, being written in a peculiar essayistic style, made him quite popular both in academic and non-academic circles. Bloch was an important voice among the intelligentsia of Weimar Germany and then, for a short period after the Second World war, the leading philosopher of the Eastern Germany. However, he quickly became a "deviator" for the Marxist ideologists. Beyond the Eastern bloc, he made a profound impact on utopian studies, theology, and aesthetics of the previous century, but also, generally, on political philosophy and critical theory. Bloch's leftist orientation and the optimistic account of hope made him a critic of existentialist thought, despite many genealogical and stylistic affinities to it. Basing on Hegel and Marx, but also drawing on many other intellectual traditions, Bloch sought to formulate the ontology and political philosophy for uncertain and open-ended world. This was reflected in his "utopian hermeneutics" seeking to uncover the unfinishedness, the "not yet" in any phenomenon of nature or culture; in his sensitivity to the immediacy of human existence (inspired, in part, by the phenomenological movement) and to the various forms of mass culture; and in his attempts to reformulate Marxism as an utopian project of humanization of nature/naturalization of humans. The experience of utopian non-identity is elevated to the level of the ontological principle: "S is not yet P", and the human quest for emancipation is grounded in the unfulfilled state of being itself.
In: I. Boldyrev and S. Stein (eds.). Interpreting Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Expositions and Critique of Contemporary Readings (pp. 260-271). L. and N. Y.: Routledge., 2021
It is curious that Hegel's Phenomenology, a text that explicitly embraces philosophy as a system ... more It is curious that Hegel's Phenomenology, a text that explicitly embraces philosophy as a system and aims to “sublate” the thinking of representation, ends with a literary image borrowed from Schiller's poetry. Many authors have tried to come to terms with this issue. This chapter contextualizes Hegel's editing work on what he quoted—for he both paraphrased and misquoted Schiller's text—and contrasts several interpretations of these interventions. While Robert Pippin uses this editing work to argue that Hegel's citation practices follow the speculative logic of/as accommodation and transformation, John McCumber, Rebecca Comay, and Katrin Pahl show in various ways how a series of shifts made by Hegel in misquoting Schiller imply both the resistance of literary imagery to dialectical appropriation and the possibility that his optimistic speculative project would fall apart. Together, these readings demonstrate how differently Hegel's phenomenological project can be judged and interpreted today in its relation to literature and history, as a totalizing system or a precarious enterprise. It also shows how a more detailed reading, which builds on these interpretive efforts, could reveal closer—and broad sweeping—affinities between Hegel and Schiller, both in their speculation and punctuation.
In the postwar USSR, there were a few scattered research groups engaged in research most closely ... more In the postwar USSR, there were a few scattered research groups engaged in research most closely resembling “Western” mainstream economics. Inspired by the new sciences of the artificial, these groups were able to make important contributions to various fields of economic theory. This article focuses on the story of one group created by the control engineer Mark Aizerman at the Institute of Control Sciences in Moscow. It discusses the origins and the outstanding diversity and dynamics of the group’s research agenda, reconstructs the factors that made Aizerman turn from the cybernetics of mechanical or biological systems to the abstract theory of choice and rationality, and demonstrates how the group was related to—and communicated with—the scholars doing work in social choice, mechanism design, and formal political theory. It also speculates on one missed research opportunity of doing experimental economics—something that, given the ideological and intellectual constraints Aizerman was facing, was hardly possible in the Soviet context, but could have been a synthesis of economics and engineering. The article also discusses a research culture Aizerman created and nurtured in his lab by encouraging research collaboration, sharing ideas, and freely moving across various disciplines.
M. Bykova and K. R. Westphal (eds.) The Palgrave Hegel Handbook (pp. 409-424). , 2020
In this chapter, I demonstrate that in his philosophy of ‘objective spirit’ Hegel was dealing wit... more In this chapter, I demonstrate that in his philosophy of ‘objective spirit’ Hegel was dealing with the problems that still preoccupy economic and social theory today. His starting points, an individual inhabiting capitalist economy, and this economy with its swift modernization and growing sophistication of needs and techniques, remind of—but surely do not coincide with—the basic presuppositions of current economic thinking. The new social form envisaged by Hegel, known under the name of ‘civil society,’ was, however, conceived as requiring a remedy to the phenomena it comprised: to the increasing atomization and isolation of human particularities and to the unrestrained self-seeking, the consequences of which were unemployment and pauperization. Homo oeconomicus had to be integrated into the more overwhelming cooperative framework of concrete universality—the state as actualized freedom. This general normative and political task in Hegel’s practical philosophy is paired with certain explanatory strategies that, I argue, play the major role in understanding the ‘objective spirit’ as a system of institutions. These ontological and heuristic principles include: continuity between physicality of individual action and sociality of institutional structures externalizing the inner; performativity implying that the spirit is a dynamic teleological embodiment of itself, its own becoming, revealing the meaning of its parts only in realization; and recognition designating the social bond and the struggle underlying the institutional edifice of modernity. Hence, not merely Hegel’s policy proposals aimed at limiting poverty and unemployment are familiar to modern economists. His institutional theory involves the challenges to and tensions of economic theorizing as it is practiced right now. Examples I draw upon are theories of social preferences, economic psychology of preferences as actions, and the suggestions to revive the notion of habit (so prominent in Hegel) as the very substance of institutional reality. Given the recent upsurge of institutional economics, these concurrences imply the lasting relevance of Hegel’s methodological and political perspectives and the need to re-integrate them as a classical foundation into any economic science to come.
Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics, 2019
The Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics (EJPE) interviewed Vogl about his intellectual c... more The Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics (EJPE) interviewed Vogl about his intellectual career, his relationship to the history and philosophy of economics, and his perspective on the analysis of contemporary capitalism.
Hegel’s poem Eleusis (1796) implies a paradox in trying to combine a critique of language as inad... more Hegel’s poem Eleusis (1796) implies a paradox in trying to combine a critique of language as inadequate for expressing the Absolute with a plea for keeping a secret. Dialectics suggests that the secret is the poem itself in its performance. I show that Eleusis envisions a certain view of history that entails a pessimistic relation to actuality and a utopian longing for the new community of those who keep secrecy. Unearthing the Christian inspiration that drives the development of the main ideas to be found in Eleusis helps to demonstrate that it is on this community enacted by the poem that the secret of the Eleusinian mysteries and, generally, the destiny of the Absolute, would further depend. In an intersubjective and thus truly dialectical way the poem should open itself towards interpretations that could ruin its initial message. This fragility remains a distinctive feature of Hegel’s speculative poetry and lends it the hope of remaining a ‘secret as secret.’
Economic methodologists most often study the relations between models and reality
while focusing ... more Economic methodologists most often study the relations between models and reality while focusing on the issues of the model’s epistemic relevance in terms of its relation to the ‘real world’ and representing the real world in a model. We complement the discussion by bringing the model’s constructive mechanisms or self-implementing technologies in play. By this, we mean the elements of the economic model that are aimed at ‘implementing’ it by envisaging the ways to change the reality in order to bring it more in line with the model. We are thus concerned mainly not with the ways to change the model to ‘fit’ the reality, but rather with the model’s own armature that is supposed to transform the world along theoretical lines. The case we study is Arrow– Debreu–McKenzie general equilibrium model. In particular, we show the following: gradient methods and stability could be regarded as constructive mechanisms of general equilibrium modeling in the context of market socialism debates; the obsession of general equilibrium theorists with these concepts can be partly explained by the fact that they hoped not to be faithful to reality, but rather to adjust it to fit the theoretical model; mechanism design theory initiated by the stability theorist Leonid Hurwicz could be seen as a successor of this position. We conclude by showing the relevance of this analysis for epistemic culture of much of contemporary economics and hence, claim that it is an important complement to the traditional philosophy of economic modeling.
Hegel investigated the limits of the social order envisaged by political economy, while admiring ... more Hegel investigated the limits of the social order envisaged by political economy, while admiring the universality of modernity. I ask how a series of tropes involved in this critique can illuminate its own limits, the nature and consequences of Hegel's engagement with political economy. The attempts to domesticate and re-integrate the economic, mostly associated with irrationality of the unconscious, turn out to be a failure, while the very logic of domestication has to follow the logic of the economic. The mutual recognition turns into a mutual mimicry, whose success presents a major threat to the speculative enterprise.
This paper considers in detail the ontological and normative presuppositions of the state-conting... more This paper considers in detail the ontological and normative presuppositions of the state-contingent approach to pricing commodities first introduced by Arrow (Le rôle des valeurs boursières pour la répartition la meilleure des risques. Econo-métrie, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris, 1953) in his model of general equilibrium under uncertainty, which became a milestone in the theory of finance. By contextualizing Arrow's fundamental contribution and subsequent developments in finance, it demonstrates how this new conceptual framework implied certain technologies-both intellectual and financial. In showing how theoretical thinking about finance was underlying institutional developments in finance, this paper complements the familiar narrative of the performativity of economics. Keywords Performativity · General equilibrium · State pricing approach · Arrow securities · Market socialism · Normativity
The British Journal for the History of Science, 2020
In the wake of Stalin's death, many Soviet scientists saw the opportunity to promote their method... more In the wake of Stalin's death, many Soviet scientists saw the opportunity to promote their methods as tools for the engineering of economic prosperity in the socialist state. The mathematician Leonid Kantorovich (1912-1986) was a key activist in academic politics that led to the increasing acceptance of what emerged as a new scientific persona in the Soviet Union. Rather than thinking of his work in terms of success or failure, we propose to see his career as exemplifying a distinct form of scholarship, as a partisan technocrat, characteristic of the Soviet system of knowledge production. Confronting the class of orthodox economists, many factors were at work, including Kantorovich's cautious character and his allies in the Academy of Sciences. Drawing on archival and oral sources, we demonstrate how Kantorovich, throughout his career, negotiated the relations between mathematics and economics , reinterpreted political and ideological frames, and reshaped the balance of power in the Soviet academic landscape.
History of Political Economy, Vol. 51, Annual Supplement, pp. 1-4, 2019
One of the strategies of the secret police in the Eastern bloc states, when dealing with ideas de... more One of the strategies of the secret police in the Eastern bloc states, when dealing with ideas deemed potentially dangerous for the power of the Communist Party, was to create division and polarize debates (a strategy natural to any police). By picking out single individuals and publicly punishing them for whatever counterrevolutionary cause-be it petit bour-geois intellectualism, Trotskyism, revisionism, Titoism, and whatnot-the police could deter and shut off those who were really critical, and put potential deviators back in line. The result was self-censorship, socialist jargon, intellectual mediocrity, and professional frustration. This is what many readers would expect to read about economists in socialist regimes. But saying so is to acknowledge that the distinctions that suggest themselves for the historiography under socialism-dogma versus reason, knowledge versus ideology, universal ideas versus Marxist stub-bornness, and so on-are rather the result of the historical processes that bring about ideas, much as they are their presupposition. Moreover, if in the standard historiography of economics, most of the works discussed in this supplement have not yet played a role, this, too, is the result of the politics that left them to us. What is historically interesting is thus the events accompanying the emergence and reproduction of these distinctions.
This paper reconstructs the ontology of finance as it is presented in Kenneth Arrow's general equ... more This paper reconstructs the ontology of finance as it is presented in Kenneth Arrow's general equilibrium model of contingent commodities. The fundamental notion of modern finance, 'Arrow securities' (paying one monetary unit contingent upon a certain future event and nothing otherwise) is considered an elementary Luhmannian code of the economic. The performative, self-implementing tendencies in general equilibrium analysis are reinterpreted in view of the joint risk design as conceived by Dirk Baecker. Creating new (markets for) risks to control the future can be, on the one hand, traced back/justified with reference to Arrow's world of contingent commodities and, on the other, rationalized as a way of adjusting the economic system and moving reality closer to its theoretical portrayal. I also associate the creation of the new 'risk structures' with the new overarching temporality inviting us to tame uncertainty and govern the future.
This paper delineates the main features of the Soviet mathematical economics by looking at its ep... more This paper delineates the main features of the Soviet mathematical economics by looking at its epistemic cultures and comparing it with the postwar American economics. Many general tendencies characteristic for the Western story were reproduced on the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain. In particular, both disciplines were increasingly mathematized, had a contested status within the political landscape in general and economics profession in particular, and were in part institutionally defined by the anti-Semitism in the academia (1950s in the USA, 1970s in the USSR). We further distinguish between the two groups of the Soviet mathematical economists: one more attached to the ’economic cybernetics’ movement, preoccupied with the optimization techniques, dealing mainly with the production sector and eventually hoping to improve centralized planning; and another group that was more comfortable with game theory and more open to standard mainstream vision of the economy. We further define more closely the institutional sites and disciplinary identities of the two subcultures and provide tentative answers to the question why, despite the excellent technical training and various overlaps with the comparable American case, Soviet mathematical economists failed to develop a sucessful and internationally competitive research programme.
INTERPRETING HEGEL'S PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT EXPOSITIONS AND CRITIQUE OF CONTEMPORARY READINGS Edited by Ivan Boldyrev and Sebastian Stein, 2023
Introduction to:
INTERPRETING HEGEL'S
PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT
EXPOSITIONS AND CRITIQUE OF CONTEMP... more Introduction to: INTERPRETING HEGEL'S PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT EXPOSITIONS AND CRITIQUE OF CONTEMPORARY READINGS Edited by Ivan Boldyrev and Sebastian Stein
In a decisive episode of Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained a former slave, Django Freeman, and... more In a decisive episode of Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained a former slave, Django Freeman, and his patron Dr. Schultz finally manage to buy Broomhilda, Django’s wife, and thus to free her from the bloody hands of the Mississippi slave owner Calvin Candie. But after signing the contract Calvin insists, unexpectedly, that the partners shake hands, otherwise the contract, according to the local norm, is invalid. Dr. Schultz is unable to make this final move: the symbolic validation constitutive of the contract means, for him, taking sides with the monster. This costs him his life: the slaughter ensues – triggered by specific performativity at play. The concept of performativity – of making something happen and exist by introducing it discursively or symbolically, through a new theoretical frame or a gesture, into the world – has become very influential in the recent decades and, after several seminal studies (see especially MacKenzie, 2006), has opened a new chapter in the philosophy of economics. In his new book, Nicolas Brisset claims that performativity has become a catch-all word, a result of ‘conceptual hijacking’ (p. 262), and sets out to clarify, criticize and reinstate the theory of performativity – that is, in my reading, the theory explaining how our knowledge matters for its very object and exploring the consequences of this mattering.
On Finding Equilibrium: Arrow, Debreu, McKenzie and the Problem of Scientific Credit, by Till Düp... more On Finding Equilibrium: Arrow, Debreu, McKenzie and the Problem of Scientific Credit, by Till Düppe and E. Roy Weintraub
This paper reconstructs the ontology of finance as it is presented in Kenneth Arrow's general equ... more This paper reconstructs the ontology of finance as it is presented in Kenneth Arrow's general equilibrium model of contingent commodities. The fundamental notion of modern finance, 'Arrow securities' (paying one monetary unit contingent upon a certain future event and nothing otherwise) is considered an elementary Luhmannian code of the economic. The performative, self-implementing tendencies in general equilibrium analysis are reinterpreted in view of the joint risk design as conceived by Dirk Baecker. Creating new (markets for) risks to control the future can be, on the one hand, traced back/justified with reference to Arrow's world of contingent commodities and, on the other, rationalized as a way of adjusting the economic system and moving reality closer to its theoretical portrayal. I also associate the creation of the new 'risk structures' with the new overarching temporality inviting us to tame uncertainty and govern the future.
Welcome to the relaunch of Serendipities – Journal for the Sociology and History of the Social Sc... more Welcome to the relaunch of Serendipities – Journal for the Sociology and History of the Social Sciences. As of December 2020, the journal is hosted by the Royal Danish Library (https://tidsskrift.dk/Serendipities). To mark our move to a new host and the reconfiguration of the editorial team, we welcome contributions to the journal, particularly those articles and book reviews that address the sociology and history of the social sciences in the broadest meaning of the description.
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Books by Ivan Boldyrev
The key contributions of this Hegelian perspective on economics lead us to the synthesis of traditional approaches and new ideas gained in economic experiments and advanced by neuroeconomists, sociologists and cognitive scientists. The proper account of contemporary 'civil society' involves comprehending it as a historically evolving totality of individual minds, ideas and intersubjective structures that are mutually dependent, tied by recognitive relations, and assert themselves as a whole in the ongoing performative movement of 'objective spitit'. The ethics of recognition is paired with the ethics of associations that supports moral principles and gives them true, concrete universality.
This unusual constellation of seemingly remote fields suggests that Hegel, read in a pragmatist mode, anticipated the new theories and philosophies of extended mind, social cognition and performativity. By providing a new conceptual apparatus and reformulating the theory of institutions in the light of this new synthesis, this book claims to give new meaning both to Hegel as interpreted from today, and to the social sciences. Seen from this perspective, such phenomena as cooperation in games, personal identity or justice in the version of Amartya Sen's 'realization-focused comparisons' are reinscribed into the logic of institutional theory. This 'Hegel' clearly goes beyond the limits of philosophical discussion and becomes a decisive reference for economists, sociologists, political scientists and other scholars who study the foundations and consequences of human sociality and try to explore and design the institutions necessary for a worthy common life.
Papers by Ivan Boldyrev
while focusing on the issues of the model’s epistemic relevance in terms of its relation
to the ‘real world’ and representing the real world in a model. We complement the
discussion by bringing the model’s constructive mechanisms or self-implementing
technologies in play. By this, we mean the elements of the economic model that are
aimed at ‘implementing’ it by envisaging the ways to change the reality in order to
bring it more in line with the model. We are thus concerned mainly not with the ways to
change the model to ‘fit’ the reality, but rather with the model’s own armature that is
supposed to transform the world along theoretical lines. The case we study is Arrow–
Debreu–McKenzie general equilibrium model. In particular, we show the following:
gradient methods and stability could be regarded as constructive mechanisms of
general equilibrium modeling in the context of market socialism debates; the obsession
of general equilibrium theorists with these concepts can be partly explained by the fact
that they hoped not to be faithful to reality, but rather to adjust it to fit the theoretical
model; mechanism design theory initiated by the stability theorist Leonid Hurwicz
could be seen as a successor of this position. We conclude by showing the relevance of
this analysis for epistemic culture of much of contemporary economics and hence,
claim that it is an important complement to the traditional philosophy of economic
modeling.
The key contributions of this Hegelian perspective on economics lead us to the synthesis of traditional approaches and new ideas gained in economic experiments and advanced by neuroeconomists, sociologists and cognitive scientists. The proper account of contemporary 'civil society' involves comprehending it as a historically evolving totality of individual minds, ideas and intersubjective structures that are mutually dependent, tied by recognitive relations, and assert themselves as a whole in the ongoing performative movement of 'objective spitit'. The ethics of recognition is paired with the ethics of associations that supports moral principles and gives them true, concrete universality.
This unusual constellation of seemingly remote fields suggests that Hegel, read in a pragmatist mode, anticipated the new theories and philosophies of extended mind, social cognition and performativity. By providing a new conceptual apparatus and reformulating the theory of institutions in the light of this new synthesis, this book claims to give new meaning both to Hegel as interpreted from today, and to the social sciences. Seen from this perspective, such phenomena as cooperation in games, personal identity or justice in the version of Amartya Sen's 'realization-focused comparisons' are reinscribed into the logic of institutional theory. This 'Hegel' clearly goes beyond the limits of philosophical discussion and becomes a decisive reference for economists, sociologists, political scientists and other scholars who study the foundations and consequences of human sociality and try to explore and design the institutions necessary for a worthy common life.
while focusing on the issues of the model’s epistemic relevance in terms of its relation
to the ‘real world’ and representing the real world in a model. We complement the
discussion by bringing the model’s constructive mechanisms or self-implementing
technologies in play. By this, we mean the elements of the economic model that are
aimed at ‘implementing’ it by envisaging the ways to change the reality in order to
bring it more in line with the model. We are thus concerned mainly not with the ways to
change the model to ‘fit’ the reality, but rather with the model’s own armature that is
supposed to transform the world along theoretical lines. The case we study is Arrow–
Debreu–McKenzie general equilibrium model. In particular, we show the following:
gradient methods and stability could be regarded as constructive mechanisms of
general equilibrium modeling in the context of market socialism debates; the obsession
of general equilibrium theorists with these concepts can be partly explained by the fact
that they hoped not to be faithful to reality, but rather to adjust it to fit the theoretical
model; mechanism design theory initiated by the stability theorist Leonid Hurwicz
could be seen as a successor of this position. We conclude by showing the relevance of
this analysis for epistemic culture of much of contemporary economics and hence,
claim that it is an important complement to the traditional philosophy of economic
modeling.
INTERPRETING HEGEL'S
PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT
EXPOSITIONS AND CRITIQUE OF CONTEMPORARY
READINGS
Edited by
Ivan Boldyrev and Sebastian Stein
The concept of performativity – of making something happen and exist by introducing it discursively or symbolically, through a new theoretical frame or a gesture, into the world – has become very influential in the recent decades and, after several seminal studies (see especially MacKenzie, 2006), has opened a new chapter in the philosophy of economics. In his new book, Nicolas Brisset claims that performativity has become a catch-all word, a result of ‘conceptual hijacking’ (p. 262), and sets out to clarify, criticize and reinstate the theory of performativity – that is, in my reading, the theory explaining how our knowledge matters for its very object and exploring the consequences of this mattering.
Die Ohnmacht des Spekulativen: Elemente einer Poetik von Hegels „Phänomenologie des Geistes“
HU Berlin, 18.01.2019