Economics of Hereness: Polish Origins of Global Developmentalism

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 instrument of defining, building, and contesting new nation-states in Europe after World War I—and then globally after World War II. The book reconstructs how Polish economists––mostly Jewish––converted Poland’s intermediary position between the industrialized West and the “underdeveloped” colonial territories into an epistemic advantage. Dubbed “Polish Keynesians,” these activist scholars developed a way of transforming a small, poor, multiethnic state into a self-expanding economy and, thus, an ethnically inclusive polity. They acted against the trend of separating nationalities and ethnic groups in new states with large minority populations. Economics of Hereness recasts the genealogy of development theory from the perspective of the blood-and-guts history of Poland and east-central Europe. ABOUT THE AUTHOR 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.