János Kornai János Kornai János Kornai, until 1945 János Kornhauser, (born 21 January 1928) is a Hungarian economist noted for his analysis and criticism of the command economies of Eastern European communist states. Kornai studied philosophy for two years at the Pázmány Péter University (now called Eötvös Loránd University) in Budapest. He gained his knowledge in economics on his own, and holds a candidate degree in the field from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He wrote that he chose to become an economist after reading Marx's "Das Kapital". He started working on "Szabad Nép," the Hungarian Communist Party newspaper, and rose to
The Communist Manifesto in theory; Marxist works such as the "Manifesto" or "Das Kapital" were read primarily by party theoreticians. On the other hand, small, dedicated militant parties and Marxist sects in the West took pride in knowing the theory; Hobsbawm says "This was the milieu in which 'the clearness of a comrade could be gauged invariably from the number of earmarks on his Manifesto. Following the October Revolution of 1917 that swept the Vladimir Lenin-led Bolsheviks to power in Russia, the world's first socialist state was founded explicitly along Marxist lines. The Soviet Union, which Bolshevik Russia would become a part of,