Editorial to the special issue on the economics of Kazimierz Łaski

Abstract

In October 2015 the Polish–Austrian Kaleckian economist Kazimierz Łaski, professor emeritus at the Johannes Kepler University Linz and former scientific director of the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies (wiiw), passed away at the age of 94. Łaski was born in Poland in 1921 into a Jewish family. He managed to survive the Nazi–German occupation and the Holocaust under very severe circumstances. In postwar Poland he studied in Warsaw at the Communist Party’s School of Social Sciences. Then, at the Main School of Planning and Statistics, he did his doctoral work and rose from assistant to professor and vice-dean. He became a member of the circle around Michał Kalecki after the latter’s return to Poland (in 1955). When, in the late 1960s, this group became the target of an antisemitic campaign, Łaski lost his positions and emigrated to Austria. There he became a professor of economics at the Johannes Kepler University Linz, and then, after his retirement from the university, he became the scientific director of the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies (wiiw). After retirement from this position, he maintained his affiliation with the wiiw until his death. As explained in more detail by Riese (2016: 265), Łaski ‘promulgated and elaborated Kalecki’s theory and demonstrated its vitality by applying it to a wide range of circumstances. Like his guru (as he himself called Kalecki (Łaski 2006)), Łaski wrote extensively on the economics of socialism and planning as well as on capitalism and its dynamics’. Apart from popularizing and developing Kalecki’s theory, Łaski was also concerned with discussing and criticizing modern neoclassical mainstream economics, as well as Marxist political economy. He worked on the economics of socialism, on issues of transition of former socialist economies towards capitalism, and, in particular, on problems of European economic integration and the eurozone crisis.1 The three editors of this special issue have known Łaski to different degrees and for different periods of time. Martin Riese was hired as an assistant when Łaski took up his professorship in Linz in 1972. In those old days of steep hierarchies in Austrian academia it was sensational that Łaski refrained completely from all the prerogatives and paraphernalia of ‘Ordinarienuniversität’ (professorial university), such as defining research topics and methods for the junior staff. Conversely, this was the heyday of anti-authoritarianism, so it would not be permissible for an assistant to share the convictions and interests of his or her boss. It took until the 1990s before the joint work of Łaski and Riese began; this came under the