The Many Roads to Serfdom

The paper considers the planning/laissez faire debate discussed in the Hayek symposium, and offers three comments. The first is that all debates are contextual and Hayek's Road to Serfdom needs to be considered in its contextual setting. The second is that there are many roads to serfdom, not just the one outlined by Hayek, and the Hayek/Lerner debate today would probably focus a different road than it did in the 1930s. The third is that modern economists' focus on technical issues has in large part removed them from the role that Hayek and other top economists played in their time.Hayek, socialism, planning, market socialism, consumer sovereignty

Regimes of Temporality: China, Tibet and the Politics of Time in the Post-2008 Era

While the politics of time are an important dimension of Chinese state discourse about Tibet, it remains insufficiently explored in theoretical and practical terms. This article examines the written and visual discourses of Tibetan temporality across Chinese state media in the post-2008 era. It analyses how these media discourses attempt to construct a ‘regime of temporality’ in order to manage public opinion about Tibet and consolidate Chinese rule over the region. While the expansion of online technologies has allowed the state to consolidate its discourses about Tibet’s place within the People’s Republic of China (PRC), they have also provided Tibetans a limited but valuable space to challenge these official representations through counter readings of Tibet’s past, present and future. In doing so, this article contributes new insights on the production of state power over Tibet, online media practices in China, and the disruptive potential of social media as sites of Tibetan counter discourses

3. The Decline of the Manor

The development of towns into commercial centers was soon accompanied by the decline of the old manorial system of agriculture and serfdom. Changes were taking place in methods of agricultural production, systems of land holding, and the quantity of land under cultivation. These changes came about as it became increasingly apparent that population growth was creating demands for the products of the soil which the old agricultural methods no longer could meet. [excerpt

The Roads To and From Serfdom

The institution of slavery displays a puzzling historical pattern: it is found mostly at intermediate stages of agricultural development, in horticultural societies, and less frequently among hunter-gatherers and societies at more advanced agrarian stages. We explain this rise-and- fall pattern of slavery in a growth model with land and labor as inputs in production. The "organization" of society is determined endogenously, and depends on agricultural technology and population density, both of which also evolve endogenously over time, and depend on how society is organized. The model replicates the full transition of the economy from an egalitarian society with no property rights; to a slave society where a despotic ruler owns both land and people; and finally into a society with a free labor market, where the ruler owns all land but all agents own their labor. In this process, the role of population growth switches from being a force driving the transition into slavery, to a force behind the transition from slavery to free labor. Our model also explains several other historical facts, e.g. why Europeans replaced free labor with slavery following the discovery of the Americas, and why those states in the 19th century US which had sparser population had a larger percentage slaves in the population.Slavery, growth, intsitutions, population

Occupational structure in the Czech lands under the second serfdom

A shift in occupational structure towards non-agricultural activities is widely viewed as a key component of European economic growth during the early modern ‘Little Divergence’. Yet little is known about this process in those parts of eastern-central Europe that experienced the early modern ‘second serfdom’, the massive increase in the institutional powers of landlords over the rural population. We analyze non-agricultural occupations under the second serfdom using data on 6,983 Bohemian villages in 1654. Bohemia resembled other eastern-central, nordic and southern European economies in having a lower percentage of non-agricultural activities than western Europe. But Bohemian serfs engaged in a wide array of industrial and commercial activities whose intensity varied significantly with village characteristics. Nonagricultural activity showed a significant positive relationship with village size, pastoral agriculture, sub-peasant social strata, Jews, freemen, female household heads, and village mills, and a significant negative relationship with arable agriculture and urban agglomerations. Non-agricultural activity was also positively associated with landlord presence in the village, although the relationship turned negative at higher values and landlord presence reversed the positive effects of female headship and mills. Under the second serfdom, landlords encouraged serf activities from which they could extort rents, while stifling others which threatened their interests

In the name of freedom: autocracy, serfdom, and suicide in Russia

The 1828 suicide of Grigorii Miasnikov in the small provincial town of Arzamas proved so controversial that it came to the attention of Tsar Nicholas I. Drawing on extensive archival sources, this article explores the meanings of this suicide from the perspective of both its ‘author’ and its subsequent ‘audiences’, including local authorities, the secret police and later memoirists and historians. The case study provides the basis for a broader investigation into the cultural, political, and social history of early-nineteenth-century Russia

Landownership Concentration and the Expansion of Education

This paper studies the effect of landownership concentration on school enrollment for nineteenth-century Prussia. Prussia is an interesting laboratory given its decentralized educational system and the presence of heterogeneous agricultural institutions. We find that landownership concentration, a proxy for the institution of serf labor, has a negative effect on schooling. This effect diminishes substantially in the second half of the century. Causality of this relationship is confirmed by introducing soil-texture to identify exogenous farm size variation. Panel estimates further rule out unobserved heterogeneity. We argue that serfdom hampered peasants’ demand for education whereas the successive emancipation triggered a demand thereof.Land concentration, Institutions, Serfdom, Education, Prussian economic history

Hayek; social theorist of the century

Keynesian economics ; Economics ; Economists