Abstract
The present article asks what lessons the empirical case of institutional change in post-Soviet Russia yields for the recent research on ideas and institutions. Its main point is that in post-Soviet Russia a clash between imported foreground ideas and deep domestic background ideas led to an ideational division among the elite of the country that became a main obstacle to the provision of coherent economic reforms. This story stands in some contrast to much of the newer literature on ideas and institutions, which tends to see critical junctures as leading from one equilibrium to another. I argue that tensions between imported foreground ideas and deep domestic backgrounds are likely to occur in other cases of far-reaching processes of institutional change based on Western ideas but taking place beyond the realm of Western, industrialized countries. Therefore, I argue, some general lessons on the interplay between ideas and institutions might be drawn from this case study.
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Notes
This empirical focus is probably due to the fact that the recent “ideational turn” took its beginnings in HI, which traditionally focuses on Western welfare states (Farrell and Finnemore 2016, p. 573).
This is a pointed formulation, but the idea that “dominant” or “shared” ideas determine a stable equilibrium is in wide use, particularly (but not only) among economists, which is not surprising given the central role of the idea of equilibrium in economic theory. A typical example is Douglass C. North, who writes that “dominant beliefs ... over time result in the accretion of an elaborate structure of institutions that determine economic and political performance” (2005, p. 2). A similar view is held by Avner Greif (e.g., 2006, pp. 139–140).
This formulation is inspired by Ban and Blyth (2013, p. 248), who in the context of the Russian Federation speak of an “ideational checkmate on top of the political one”—I guess what they have in mind is a stalemate.
As Peter Rutland (2013, p. 337) puts it: “There is no evidence that neoliberal ideas became ‘hegemonic’ across the majority of political and economic elites in the region, still less amongst the population at large.”
That conflicts and tensions between imported and domestic beliefs form an important problem in processes of economic development is, of course, not a new insight. For example, it is a central topic in Arturo Escobar’s Encountering Development. What I believe to be original about my approach is to focus on the ideas of the intellectual elites (or more precisely: a subgroup within the intellectual elites) rather than on beliefs held by broader strata of society and that I discuss this problem in the context of the recent research on ideas and institutions.
This is again related to a recent discussion in HI where two authors mainly working on less developed countries argue that the belief of many HI scholars that institutions “either reflected or generated shared expectations” in fact reflects the reality of Western developed countries and does not “travel as well to the developing world” (Levitsky and Murillo 2009, p. 116).
The journals examined here are in alphabetical order: Ekonomicheskaia nauka sovremennoi Rossii, Ekonomika i matematicheskye metody, EKO, Ekonomicheskaia politika (from its establishment in 2006), Ekonomist, Mirovaia ekonomika i mezhdunarodnye otnoshenia, Obshchestvo i ekonomika, Rossiiskii ekonomicheskii zhurnal, Vestnik moskovskogo universiteta (seriia 6), Voprosy ekonomiki.
To avoid a misunderstanding: In my view every European country is historically and culturally specific and thus has to develop its own variety of European modernity.
To avoid a misunderstanding: As especially Polanyi has made it clear, also in order to create capitalism a strong state is needed. The decisive difference between capitalism and socialism, then, is not a weak versus a strong state but rather the question of whether state power is used to create or to destroy markets.
It is understood that the systems border between polity and economy is always permeable; what is decisive here is only that in a functionally differentiated society the economic and the political “value spheres” can be clearly distinguished (though, of course, also in functionally differentiated societies there are fields of intersection where this distinction might be not so clear).
It should not go without notice that in his later works Blyth further developed his basic concept. For example, his 2006 article on “Great Punctuations” can already be interpreted as a “tipping-point story” (for this interpretation see, Mukherji 2013, p. 369) that pays much more attention to what Soifer later referred to as “productive conditions.”
A term introduced by Hall (1993).
The reverse process of a re-integration of the economy into the political system (a socialist transformation) also would be a great transformation, but Polanyi was only interested in capitalist transformations.
It should be noted that Alfred Müller-Armack was the inventor of the term “Social Market Economy,” which can be seen as a prime example of a successful framing strategy.
As Richard Pipes ([1974] 1993, p. 232) pointedly put it, “the entire ideology of royal absolutism was worked out by clergymen who felt that the interests of religion and church were best served by a monarchy with no limits to its power.”
Up to the present day from time to time a similar critique “pops up” in the writings of Catholic thinkers (recently, e.g., Deneen 2018). Thus, what is specific about Orthodoxy is not the idea as such (which simply is a part of the Christian legacy) but the radicality and frequency with which the refusal of the idea of functional differentiation was and still is raised among Russian intellectuals.
For accounts that emphasize the modern side of Soviet socialism, see Jowitt 1992; Kharkhordin 1999. Jowitt sees the Soviet social order as an “amalgam of charismatic, traditional, and modern features (p. 128), but holds “that its traditional features are more structural than substantive in nature” (p. 17). Very much in line with my own line of argument, Kharkhordin emphasizes that the official milieus of Soviet society (such as factories, offices, and schools) “were to be remade as if in accordance with these practices of life in the ideal church congregation” (p. 55). At the same time, he also highlights individualization processes as they, for example, manifested themselves in the increasing role of individual birthday celebrations (p. 335).
In the background of the distinction between isolating and contextual economics is the Methodenstreit (battle over methods) in economics between Gustav Schmoller and Carl Menger. This debate was a major influence on Karl Polanyi’s distinction between formalism and substantivism. According to him (Polanyi 1957, p. 243), the term economic has a double meaning in that it both refers to the problem of choice between alternative uses of scarce means (= formal meaning) and to the problem how people satisfy their needs in their social and natural environment (= substantivist meaning). Polanyi’s distinction led to an intense debate in anthropology (for a short overview, see Isaac 2005).
This can be interpreted in terms of Imre Lakatos’s theory of scientific research programmes: The core of the ideological programme (collective property and central planning) was tightened, but at the same time the protective belt around the hard core was widened by admitting discussion on topics that previously would not have been tolerated (for more detail on this, see Zweynert 2006).
For a detailed account of the clashes between “people of the sixties” and “people of the seventies” and the relevance of these clashes for Russian economic policy, see Gel’man et al. 2014.
Indeed, in a two-part article jointly written with Vladimir Mau and published in 2004, Gaidar explicitly professed to historical materialism and to what he and his co-author referred to as “liberal Marxism.”
The question of how Russia could regain her status as a leading power in the world that during the last years has so much moved into the foreground was in fact present from the very beginning of the reform debate: Only by joining in the worldwide direction of social development could Russia remain (or again become) one of the “leaders of world-wide progress,” Iurii V. Iakovets (1994, p. 83) argued. And more than that, the very fact that she had entered the period of painful “transition of the whole human community” earlier than the other major countries (ibid., p. 77), gave her the chance to play “not the smallest role in overcoming the difficulties that are awaiting mankind.”
Not to be confused with his father Valerii Radaev, an economist of the shestidesiatniki generation (quoted earlier in this article).
The terms “thought collective” and “thought style” were introduced by Ludwik Fleck ([1935] 1977, p. 39) who defined them as follows: “If we define ‘thought collective’ as a community of persons mutually exchanging ideas or maintaining intellectual interaction, we will find by implication that it also provides the special ‘carrier’ for the historical development of any field of thought, as well as for the given stock of knowledge and level of culture. This we have designated thought style.” The term “thought collective” is akin to Peter M. Haas’s (1992) concept of “epistemic communities” and Robert Wuthnow’s (1989) “communities in discourse.” However, in Haas’s concept the emphasis is on policy agendas (e.g., it has been successfully used to describe the Mont Pèlerin Society), whereas Wuthnow is mainly interested in the link between social conditions and the emergence of ideas. Of the three related concepts, Fleck’s idea of thought collectives in my view is best suited to deal with the conflict between different images of social reality among scientists.
The following is based on Dabrowska and Zweynert 2015.
I find it interesting to see that in one of the first texts on convergence, the Russian-born Harvard sociologist Pitrim Sorokin basically revived ideas that are well known from Russian romantic thought. Little wonder then, that these ideas found a particularly fruitful soil in Russia. On the Russian reception of the idea of convergence, see Zweynert 2018, unpublished manuscript.
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I would like to thank Ivan Boldyrev, two anonymous referees, and a Theory and Society Senior Editor for extremely helpful comments that have decisively helped me to clarify my argument. The usual disclaimer applies.
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Zweynert, J. Contextualizing critical junctures: what post-Soviet Russia tells us about ideas and institutions. Theor Soc 47, 409–435 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-018-9319-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-018-9319-5