Economic systems and the reforms processes examined in Consistency and Viability of Socialist Economics Systems are the centrally administered socialist economics system of the Soviet Union, the Liberman-Kosygin reforms, the Gorbachev reforms and market socialism of Yugoslavia.

Consistency and Viability of Islamic Economics Systems and the Transition Process outlines the transition problem for non-market economies and creates an analytic framework for understanding the cause and effect of these economies.

Consistency and Viability of Capitalist Economic Systems develops an original analytical framework to understand the relationship between the economic, political, and ideological structures, the external environment, and the process of reform that give rise to certain economic systems by establishing consistency.

The rise of China is ever-present in debates on globalisation and ongoing power shifts. In a time of rising international tensions, understanding the interdependencies between China's course and the world economy is ever more important. Often, the economic reforms under Deng Xiaoping after 1978 are emphasised. They initiated dramatic changes in China's economy and contributed to its ascent as a world power. In contrast, less attention has been given to the context in which these reforms were implemented. Philippe Lionnet analyses important adjustments in China's agricultural, industrial and foreign trade policies in the course of the 1970s as well as their origins. He shows how policy experiments and their limits shaped the path of the socialist state.

How, despite thirty years of effort, Soviet attempts to build a national computer network were undone by socialists who seemed to behave like capitalists. Between 1959 and 1989, Soviet scientists and officials made numerous attempts to network their nation—to construct a nationwide computer network. None of these attempts succeeded, and the enterprise had been abandoned by the time the Soviet Union fell apart. Meanwhile, ARPANET, the American precursor to the Internet, went online in 1969. Why did the Soviet network, with top-level scientists and patriotic incentives, fail while the American network succeeded? In How Not to Network a Nation, Benjamin Peters reverses the usual cold war dualities and argues that the American ARPANET took shape thanks to well-managed state subsidies and collaborative research environments and the Soviet network projects stumbled because of unregulated competition among self-interested institutions, bureaucrats, and others. The capitalists behaved like socialists while the socialists behaved like capitalists. After examining the midcentury rise of cybernetics, the science of self-governing systems, and the emergence in the Soviet Union of economic cybernetics, Peters complicates this uneasy role reversal while chronicling the various Soviet attempts to build a “unified information network.” Drawing on previously unknown archival and historical materials, he focuses on the final, and most ambitious of these projects, the All-State Automated System of Management (OGAS), and its principal promoter, Viktor M. Glushkov. Peters describes the rise and fall of OGAS—its theoretical and practical reach, its vision of a national economy managed by network, the bureaucratic obstacles it encountered, and the institutional stalemate that killed it. Finally, he considers the implications of the Soviet experience for today's networked world.

In Poland, contemporary political actors have constructed a narrative of Polish history since 1989 in which Polish and Jewish involvement with communism has created a national concept of “we.” Weaponizing the Past explores the resulting implications of national belonging through a lens of collective memory. Taking a constructivist approach to electoral politics and nation making in Poland’s past, this volume’s dual line of inquiry articulates why and how elites politicize the past, what effect this politicization produces, and contextualizes this politicization to illustrate contemporary production of anti-Semitism.

3 edge, methods and theory. I turn now to some of my own reflections on this score. Some Reflections My first proposition is that if we are interested in analyzing the performance and dynamic properties of the world's economies, it is only at significant peril that comparative economists can overlook noneconomic or "political" factors. This is not to say that it is illegitimate to abstract from non-economic factors for particular purposes; rather, such abstraction should occur only with cogni zance of the influences being suppressed. I have argued elsewhere that the analytical compromise in suppressing noneconomic variables is greater for the study of planned than for market economies. [7] Borrowing from Polanyi [8], it is claimed that in market sys tems the economic sphere is disembedded from (separate and not subordinate to) the political, social and cultural spheres, while in planned systems the economic sphere is embedded in the noneconomic spheres. To be sure, market economies are strongly affected by political and cultural factors, but planned economies have and often exercise the potential to let political goals dominate in making production, allocational, or distributional choices. Indeed, it is difficult in practice to separate out what are political and what are economic decisions in planned systems.