Rejoinder to Comparative economics and the mainstream by László Csaba

I read Csaba’s tribute to János Kornai, “Comparative economics and the mainstream” with great interest and was impressed by his evident admiration for Kornai’s work. Csaba’s paper is a brief recount of Kornai’s intellectual biography in which he highlights Kornai’s major contribution of each decade. Throughout the paper, as the title might suggest, there is running commentary with respect to the relationship between Kornai’s work and ‘mainstream economics’. The underlying question throughout the paper is why Kornai’s work did not become more influential in the mainstream, if Kornai offered all the necessary ingredients for his work to become more recognised than it has actually been. Csaba’s concern is that “Given his unparalleled embeddedness in the Western academic world ever since the mid-1960s...his highly original and equally unusually influential ideas have had a limited, if any, impact on mainstream economics, as taught in global economics programmes at PhD level” (p. 33). Csaba’s narrative suggests that there was a kind of progression in Kornai’s work that should have made him acceptable to the mainstream, but that, in the end, his “subject of analysis as well as the conditions under which the author formulated his academic interests... kept him within the confines of institutional economics” (p. 49). Due to space limitations I will only focus on two aspects that are important from the perspective of the philosophy of economics. The first aspect is that which Csaba presents as Kornai’s lifelong methodological choice and which Kornai himself called ‘The system paradigm’ (2000). This approach involves a holistic view of the object of study in which “the relevance of interdependencies among various elements and subfields” is highlighted. In the system paradigm, the institutional and legal framework by which the economic activity is made possible, as well as the sociological and ideological aspects, are constitutive of the analysis (Kornai, 1998). Csaba introduc-