The disproportionate role of scholars from Central/Eastern/Southeastern Europe in social scientific innovation in the first half of the 20th century has been oft-noted but little explained. Małgorzata Mazurek claimed that this little illuminated history can tell us something about how to conceive of Eastern Europe as a key “locality” for thinking about the modern world. This approach, which takes the geography of knowledge seriously, looks at post-imperial Eastern Europe as a space and time of transforming histories of “elsewhere” into knowledge about “everywhere.”
The talk introduced Mazurek's current book project, Economics of Hereness, in which she traces how ideas envisioned as solutions to a localized problem––Michał Kalecki and Ludwik Landau’s idea of a full-employment economy for interwar Poland’s multiethnic population––became a key source of economic development theory. What was later viewed as universal for the entire non-Western world had, in fact, originated in a highly specific set of regional circumstances.
Małgorzata Mazurek is a sociologist-turned-historian and an associate professor of Polish Studies in the History Department at Columbia University. Her interests include the history of social sciences, international development, and the social history of labor and consumption in 20th-century Poland. She published Society in Waiting Lines: On Experiences of Shortages in Postwar Poland (Warsaw, 2010). Her recent book project, Economics of Hereness (forthcoming, Cornell UP), revises the history of developmental thinking from the perspective of interwar Poland and its problem of multi-ethnicity.
Ivan Krastev, IWM Permanent Fellow, moderated the colloquium.
