Marian Malowist Seminar. “Economics of Hereness. Polish Development Economists in an Age of Nation-State Building (1918-1968)”
Please join us for a lecture as part of the Marian Malowist Global History Seminar entitled: “Economics of Hereness. Polish Development Economists in an Age of Nation-State Building (1918-1968)”.
The lecture will be given by Prof. Małgorzata Mazurek z Columbia University.
The event will take place on 14 May, at 15.00, in Room 17. You are cordially invited to attend.
Abstract:
Economics of Hereness examines the east-central European origins of development concepts that came to dominate the postwar world. It treats social science as a situated phenomenon shaped by the twentieth century’s violent politics. It explains why and how developmental thought became the key to defining, building, and contesting new nation-states in Europe after World War I and globally after World War II. The book reconstructs how Polish economists–Michał Kalecki, Ludwik Landau, and their circle of the Warsaw intellectual Left, developed a way of transforming a poor, multiethnic Polish state into a self-expanding economy and, thus, a socially and ethnically inclusive polity. I argue that the theories of economic development that prevailed in the postwar world emerged not from the pristine offices of theoretical economists in the West but from the turbulent history of interwar and Nazi-occupied East Central Europe. The book is about the Polish macroeconomic revolution: the missing piece in modern social science, international development, and the political economy of capitalism and socialism.
Bio:
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Małgorzata Mazurek is an associate Professor in Polish Studies in the History Department at Columbia University. Her interests include the history of social sciences, international development, the social history of labor and consumption in twentieth-century Poland, and Polish-Jewish studies. She published Society in Waiting Lines: On Experiences of Shortages in Postwar Poland (Warsaw, 2010), which deals with the history of social inequalities under state socialism. Her current book project, Economics of Hereness, revises the history of developmental thinking from the perspective of interwar Poland and its problem of multi-ethnicity. She has recently written about the idea of full employment in interwar Poland for the American Historical Review, history of social sciences for a survey handbook, The Interwar World, and the university as the Second-Third World Space in the Cold War for the volume Socialist Internationalism and the Gritty Politics of the Particular edited by Kristin Roth-Ey. |