Economic Science. Essays on Intellectual History

The monograph consists of three parts dedicated to current issues in the methodology of economic science, a set of general problems in the history of economic thought, and discourses of Soviet economic science. Economic science is examined as a phenomenon of intellectual history, in the context of the intellectual and socio-political environment of its development. In the methodological section of the monograph, unlike the traditional focus on theory, emphasis is placed on the relationships between theoretical and applied knowledge on one hand, and between specialized economic knowledge and socio-philosophical (ontological) concepts on the other. The question of the role of the latter is investigated in the context of increasing segmentation and fragmentation of economic knowledge. The historical and scientific section explores a number of new themes. Firstly, a new interpretation of the formation of economics as a science is justified, connecting this process with the scientific revolution of the 17th-18th centuries, as well as the key role of R. Cantillon's treatise in the theorization of economic knowledge. Secondly, archival materials from the unpublished legacy of K. Marx, related to Cantillon's treatise and allowing for a clarification of the chronology of Marx's economic views and his historical-scientific concept, are introduced into scientific circulation. In the section dedicated to the economic thought of the Soviet period, a new approach to analyzing the specific discourse of Soviet political economy of socialism is proposed, using discussions about property and commodity-money relations, as well as an analysis of the transformation of the economic profession in the late Soviet Union. The monograph summarizes the results of the author's forty years of research and is based both on previously published works scattered across various publications and on new studies in relevant fields.