scholarly journals The Peculiarities of the Development of Economic Thought in Lithuania (Sixteenth-Nineteenth Centuries)

2005 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-120
Author(s):  
Egidija Laumenskaitė

Economic thought in Lithuania has comparatively deep historical roots and some special achievements to its credit. The establishment of the Department of Political Economy at the University of Vilnius in 1803 was the first such high recognition of the physiocrats’ concept in the history of economic science. The reasons for physiocracy to appear as a syllabus subject at Vilnius University were rooted not only in the specific character of the country’s economy and educational system, but also in the ideological prehistory of the discipline. The turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries marked the first period of vigorous development in economic thought in Lithuania and coincided with the development of economic ideas at Vilnius University, established in 1579. Rapid changes in economic life and the widespread Reformation movement in the mid-sixteenth century gave birth to active debates on social and economic issues. At that time the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was not merely following the development of economic ideas of the West (which was the fact later, especially with the upsurge in the economic thought in the twentieth century), but also disputing them (although the scope of this polemic was noticeably slender) and looking for solutions to the country’s keenest economic problems. The economic ideas of Jan Abramowicz, Marcin Smiglecki and others are worth consideration in the context of the development of European economic thought as a whole. The educational reforms at Vilnius University at the end of the eighteenth century (from Vilnius Academy, managed by Jesuits, to a more open educational institution) gave a birth to a new upsurge of economic thought in Lithuania. Vilnius University adopted the new discipline of Political Economy. Professors Hieronim Stroynowski, Jan Waszkewicz, and Michał Oczapowski started developing various courses in economics. However, after the Uprising of 1831 the University of Vilnius was closed down and further development of economic thought was restricted for almost a century. The unsteady evolution of economic thought in Lithuania in the period under review is connected with the country’s general economic and political development.

Ekonomika ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 65 ◽  
Author(s):  
Egidija Laumenskaitė

This paper gives a concise overview of the development of the economic thought in Lithuania mentioning the very special event in the history of the economic science - the establishment of the Department of Political Economy in Vilnius University in 1803 as the first Department of Political Economy in the world.


2012 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 81-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Fine ◽  
Dimitris Milonakis

AbstractIn this response to the symposium on our two books we try to deal as fully as possible in the brief space available with most of the major issues raised by our distinguished commentators. Although at least three of them are in agreement with the main thrust of the arguments put forward in our books, they all raise important issues relating to methodology, the history of economic thought (including omissions), and a number of more specific issues. Our answer is based on the restatement of the chief purpose of our two books, describing the intellectual history of the evolution of economic science emphasising the role of the excision of the social and the historical from economic theorising in the transition from (classical) political economy to (neoclassical) economics, only for the two to be reunited through the vulgar form of economics imperialism following the monolithic dominance of neoclassical economics at the expense of pluralism after the Second World War. The importance of political economy for the future of economic science is vigorously argued for.


2002 ◽  
Vol 37 ◽  
pp. 255-274
Author(s):  
Jane Garnett

When, in 1904–5, Max Weber published his famous essay on The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism’, he set out to explore the reasons for an affinity, the existence of which was a commonplace in large parts of Europe and North America. Whilst the literature on the strengths and weaknesses of Weber’s thesis is vast, much less attention has been paid to the contours of the mid to late nineteenth-century debate out of which his interest developed. Yet the neglect of that context has continued to foster over-simplified views of the world with which Weber’s argument originally engaged. His essay forms part of a much more extensive discourse on the role of religious belief in economic life. This paper discusses one particular nexus of that debate: the way in which British Protestants shaped their economic ethic by reference both to their ideas of Catholicism and to perceived oversimplifications of Protestant virtue; and the way in which Catholics in Italy responded to the promotion by secular liberals of what was seen by them as ‘puritan’ economics – that is, the maxims of British classical political economy. To compare the British and Italian contemporary literatures on this theme helps to draw out and to clarify some significant complexities in nineteenth-century thinking about the relationship between economics and morality. Underpinning each religious critique in Britain and in Italy was an emphasis on the necessary closeness of the relationship between attitudes to work and attitudes to the rest of life. In each case this implied an assertion at the philosophical level that economics had a metaphysical dimension which needed to be justified, and at a practical level that time spent both working and not working was devotional. Because each was engaging with a popularized model of political economy there were in fact methodological affinities between their respective positions in this context, little though each would often have liked to acknowledge it. These have been obscured by obvious distinctions of cultural and political development which have in turn produced different historiographical traditions. Moreover, the predominance, since the early twentieth century, of a supposedly ‘objective’ model of economics which tacitly denies its metaphysical dimension has meant that nineteenth-century Christian economic thought has been discussed rather as part of the multiple stories of denominational social action than as what it more crucially set out to be: that is, a radical intellectual challenge to the premises of mainstream economic assumptions.


Author(s):  
عبد الرزاق بلعباس

 يتناول هذا البحث نشأة مصطلح الاقتصاد السياسي في العالم الإسلامي، ومقارنته في الأدبيات العربية والتركية والأردية، وعلاقته بالمصطلح الفرنسي économie politique، والمصطلح الإنجليزي political economy، مع تجاوز الإشارة إلى واضع المصطلح، ومسألة المناسبة في اختيار التسمية بين اللفظ المترجم والمصطلح الأصلي. فالمقصود الرئيس للبحث يتعلَّق بالعملية الإدراكية التي ولَّدت المصطلح: هل تأخذ منحى البناء على ما هو موجود أم تعلن القطيعة معه؟ وعلى هذا، يجب تسليط الضوء على مسألة تطوُّر الكتابة من منظور الحياة المعيشية الواقعية في المجتمعات المسلمة؛ ما يُحتِّم الانتقال من دراسة تاريخ الفكر الاقتصادي الإسلامي إلى دراسة تاريخ الفكر الاقتصادي في هذه المجتمعات. This study deals with the origin of the concept of ‘political economy’ in the Muslim world through a comparison between Arabic, Turkish and Urdu literature. The study found that the concept entered the Muslim world through the translation of the French term ‘économie politique’ and the English term ‘political economy’. The study recommends going beyond the concern of who introduced first the concept, and the suitability of the translated or original terms. The central issue is the cognitive process that has generated the concept; whether adopting a constructive approach to what exists or to break with it. The study recommends shedding light on the evolution of writings on the economic life in Muslim societies and calls for a transition from the study of the history of economic thought in Islam to the history of economic thought in Muslim societies.


2018 ◽  
pp. 95-110
Author(s):  
L. D. Shirokorad

This article shows how representatives of various theoretical currents in economics at different times in history interpreted the efforts of Nikolay Sieber in defending and developing Marxian economic theory and assessed his legacy and role in forming the Marxist school in Russian political economy. The article defines three stages in this process: publication of Sieber’s work dedicated to the analysis of the first volume of Marx’s Das Kapital and criticism of it by Russian opponents of Marxian economic theory; assessment of Sieber’s work by the narodniks, “Legal Marxists”, Georgiy Plekhanov, and Vladimir Lenin; the decline in interest in Sieber in light of the growing tendency towards an “organic synthesis” of the theory of marginal utility and the Marxist social viewpoint.


2019 ◽  
pp. 135-145
Author(s):  
Viktor A. Popov

Deep comprehension of the advanced economic theory, the talent of lecturer enforced by the outstanding working ability forwarded Vladimir Geleznoff scarcely at the end of his thirties to prepare the publication of “The essays of the political economy” (1898). The subsequent publishing success (8 editions in Russia, the 1918­-year edition in Germany) sufficiently demonstrates that Geleznoff well succeded in meeting the intellectual inquiry of the cross­road epoch of the Russian history and by that taking the worthful place in the history of economic thought in Russia. Being an acknowledged historian of science V. Geleznoff was the first and up to now one of the few to demonstrate the worldwide community of economists the theoretically saturated view of Russian economic thought in its most fruitful period (end of XIX — first quarter of XX century).


2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-124
Author(s):  
Czesław Łapicz

The paper contains a synthetic discussion of original and little known philological manuscripts which had been created since the 16th century by Tatars – Muslims of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania – as characteristic Slavic aljamiado. The preserved manuscripts in which Slavic languages – Polish and Belarusian – were recorded in the Arabic alphabet are enormously important for the history of both languages and the Slavic-Oriental language relations. Various types of these historical texts (kitabs, chamails, tajweeds, etc.) contain the first, that is the oldest (16th century), translation of the Quran into a Slavic language (Polish) recorded in the Arabic alphabet (so-called tafsir). These sources are studied within the framework of an original philological sub-discipline of Kitab Studies whose origin and development should be credited to Professor Anton Antonovich from Vilnius University. The author of the paper discusses the research methodology pertaining to these sources, particularly the transliteration of Slavic texts recorded in the Arabic alphabet into the Latin alphabet, and introduces prospective major research tasks for Kitab Studies.


2002 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 124-128
Author(s):  
Kamran Asghar Bokhari

Many scholars have attempted to tackle the question of why democracy has seemingly failed to take root in the Islamic milieu, in general, and the pre dominantlyArab Middle East, in particular, while the rest of the world has witnessed the fall of"pax-authoritaria" especially in the wake of the demercratic revolution triggered by the failure of communism. Some view this resistance to the Third Wave, as being rooted in the Islamic cultural dynamics of the region, whereas others will ascribe it to the level of political development (or the lack thereof). An anthology of essays, Challenges to Democracy in the Middle East furnishes the reader with five historical casestudies that seek to explain the arrested socio politico-economic development of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, and Turkey, and the resulting undemercratic political culture that domjnates the overall political landscape of the Middle East. The first composition in this omnibus is "The Crisis of Democracy in Twentieth Century Syria and Lebanon," authored by Bill Harris, senior lecturer of political studies at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. Haris compares and contrasts the political development of Syria and Lebanon during the French mandate period and under the various regimes since then. He examines how the two competing forms of national­ism, i.e., Lebanonism and Arabism, along with sectarianism, are the main factors that have contributed to the consolidation of one-party rule in Syria, and the I 6-year internecine conflict in Lebanon. After a brief overview of the early history of both countries, the author spends a great deal oftime dis­cussing the relatively more recent political developments: Syria from 1970 onwards, and Lebanon from I 975 to the I 990s. Harris expresses deep pes­simism regarding the future of democratic politics in both countries, which in his opinion is largely due to the deep sectarian cleavages in both states. The next treatise is "Re-inventing Nationalism in B􀀥thi Iraq 1968- 1994: SupraTerritorial Identities and What Lies Below," by Amatzia Baram, professor of Middle East History at the University of Haifa. Baram surveys the Ba·th's second stint in power (1968-present) in lraq. Baram's opinion is that a shift has occurred in B􀀥thist ideology from an integrative Pan-Arab program to an Iraqi-centered Arab nationalism. She attributes this to Saddam's romance with the past, on the one hand, which is the reason for the incorporation of themes from both the ancient Mesopotamian civiliza­tion and the medieval Abbasid caliphal era, and, on the other hand, to Islam and tribalism, that inform the pragmatic concerns of the Ba'thist ideological configuration ...


2009 ◽  
Vol 10 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 209-223
Author(s):  
Galina Miškinienė

Institute of the Lithuanian Language At the beginning of the 19th century, the financial possibility to establish a department of Eastern languages at one of the oldest universities in Eastern Europe, Vilnius University, appeared. Turkish was among the Eastern languages that were expected to be taught. The intensive preparation of lecturers was started. Unfortunately, the ambitious plans were destined to never become reality; in 1832 the university was closed. Nevertheless, over the following two centuries the Turkic direction did not disappear; in one form or another it surfaced and retained its vitality. There was a sympathetic environment: Tartars and Karaims—both Turkic ethnic groups—began settling in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the 14th century. Vilnius University was the cradle of many famous Orientalists who maintained Turkic research by their activities. In such a way, two main research subjects appeared: Kitabistik and the Karaim language. In this article, the origin problems, development and prospects of Turkic research will be examined.


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