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The Social Context of Dissent: A Response to Barnett and Samuels

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2009

Roger Backhouse
Roger Backhouse
Affiliation:
University of Birmingham, Department of Economics, Edgbaston, Birmingham, BIS 2TT, United Kingdom.
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Extract

In my note on dissent (2004), I emphasized that heterodoxy and dissent had to be defined socially. Given that crucial elements of the social context differ from one society to another, it follows that the meaning and significance of dissent may vary too. Barnett (2006) has pointed out a conclusion I should have drawn explicitly: that my suggestions for thinking about dissent make sense only in Western economics. In the former Soviet Union, as he points out, dissent in economics could not be understood apart from the political situation. The examples he cites illustrate some of the ways in which dissent in Soviet economics differed from that in the West, where there was no officially sanctioned orthodoxy comparable to Marxism-Leninism (or rather to what the Soviet authorities chose to call by that name) from which economists wished either safely to signal their dissent or to which they wished, despite their dissent, to be seen to adhere. We see here, it might be argued, a simple difference between two types of society.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the History of Economic Thought , Volume 28 , Issue 1 , March 2006 , pp. 125 - 126
Copyright
Copyright © The History of Economics Society 2006

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References

REFERENCES

Backhouse, Roger E. (2004) A Suggestion for Simplifying the Study of Dissent in Economics, Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 26 (2), pp. 261–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barnett, Vincent (2006) Further Thoughts on Clarifying the Idea of Dissent: The Russian and Soviet Experience, The Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 28 (1), pp. 113–119.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Loureiro, Maria Rita (1997) The Professional and Political Impacts of the Internationalization of Economics in Brazil, in: Coats, A. W. (Ed) The Post-1945 Internationalization of Economics (Durham: Duke University Press) Annual Supplement to History of Political Economy 28, pp. 184–207.Google Scholar
Samuels, Warren J. (2006) Roger Backhouse on the Study of Dissent, Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 28 (1), pp. 121–125.CrossRefGoogle Scholar