Branko Horvat Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Branko Horvat (1928–2003) was a Croatian economist and one of the most active public intellectuals of former socialist Yugoslavia. He is best known for his work on Marxist economic theory in general and the theory of the labor-managed firm in particular. His approach is sometimes referred to as Marxism-Horvatism. Horvat was director of the Institute of Economic Sciences in Belgrade, Serbia; a long-time editor of the well-respected journal Economic Analysis and Workers’ Self-Management; and an adviser to the Yugoslav government and several other countries in the world.

Horvat is recognized for his criticism of existing political and economic systems, both in the West and in the East. He promoted a third system that would avoid both the pitfalls of capitalism in Europe and Northern America and etatism, as he called the state socialist systems of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Horvat believed both were inefficient in their developmental results as well as unjust in their distribution of property and power. He hoped that a third model, that of socialism, could be developed to overcome these shortcomings. Yugoslavia had the opportunity to produce this vision of a better socioeconomic system, but Horvat was nevertheless critical of what he saw as various problems of Yugoslav reality. He advocated a mixture of self-management, the market, and planning to overcome the economic crisis which gripped the country in the 1970s and 1980s. Horvat placed great hope in economics as a scientific enterprise comparable to the hard sciences, and he was very confident about the type of knowledge economists could produce. His confidence in economic analysis garnered him a high standing in global leftist circles. He was even in the running for a Nobel Prize in Economics after the publication of his Political Economy of Socialism in 1982. In his own country, however, he was often out of sync with current politics.

Horvat was one of several intellectuals who founded the Yugoslav Democratic Initiative at the end of the 1980s.The initiative attempted to establish its base in all the republics and to simultaneously avoid ethnic conflict while promoting democracy. After the initiative failed and Yugoslavia broke apart, Horvat’s political outlook only grew dimmer as he clashed with the economic policy of the newly independent Croatian government. He organized a small Social Democratic Party, which never recorded significant electoral results. Despite his scientific credentials, Horvat was forced to retire from his position at the University of Zagreb. He remains notable for his advocacy of market socialism, self-management, and participation as a way of more efficiently and democratically organizing the economy and society as well as his constant efforts in developing a rigorous scientific analysis to support these arguments.

Bibliography:

Franicevic,Vojmir, and Milica Uvalic, eds. Equality, Participation,Transition: Essays in Honour of Branko Horvat. London: Macmillan, 2000.
Horvat, Branko. The Political Economy of Socialism: A Marxist Social Theory. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1982.
“The Theory of the Worker-Managed Firm Revisited.” Journal of Comparative Economics 10 (1996): 9–25.
Ward, Benjamin. “Marxism-Horvatism: A Yugoslav Theory of Socialism; A Review Article.” The American Economic Review 57 (1967): 509–523.

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