Reform economics at the Financial Research Institute in late socialist Hungary: A case of globally embedded knowledge production

Abstract

The paper addresses this issue’s subject of the question of East/West hierarchies in academe, and the conditions of the epistemic position and public authority of East and Central European scholarship, through a case study of a major institute of Hungarian reform economics, the Financial Research Institute (FRI), and a moment of political critique by its experts in 1986, asserted in the political pamphlet ‘Change and Reform’. The paper points out connections between world economic and geopolitical shifts, consequent reorganizations of Hungary’s world economic integration. It addresses changes to the institutional power and political position of reform economics at FRI, from the perspective of conditions set by the relationship between import substitution industrialization, the pressure for hard currency created by technological imports, and the changing global economic conditions affecting the availability of technology and capital. Through placing the expert and political critique developed at FRI into that context, the paper contributes to a perspective on ECE social science that goes beyond measuring local scientific paradigms to Western ones, and which understands the epistemic position and public authority of local social science as shaped by formative interactions embedded in a common global history.