Ja ´nos Kornai, By Force of Thought: Irregular Memoirs of an Intellectual Journey , translation by Brian McLean of A gondolat ereje´vel: Rendhagyo´ o¨ne´letrajz (Budapest: Osiris, 2005 and London and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006) pp. xix + 461, $40.00. ISBN 0-262-11302-3. For five decades Ja ´nos Kornai has been the most dedicated economist of the centrally planned economies typical of the Soviet bloc since World War II to the 1990s. Barred from university teaching in his native Hungary, by the early 1980s citations of Kornai in Hungarian economic literature had nonetheless overtaken those of Marx and Lenin, and Kornai has influenced thousands of students and analysts of socialist economies worldwide. This success came from applying techniques of modern analytical economics within a broad socio-political perspective that Kornai attributes to Marx’s Capital. Committed to Hungary, Kornai’s native knowledge of the country’s economy and its politics also grounded his theories of socialist evolution and transformation. Even when he finally accepted a Harvard appointment in 1986, following offers elsewhere, it came with an agreement that he return to Budapest for half the year. Published as Overcentralization in Economic Administration (1959), Kornai completed his Ph.D. dissertation in Hungary in September 1956, just one month before the Soviet-crushed Hungarian Revolution. This critique of Stalinist political economy was immediately influential through a public defense attended by about 200 people. Significantly, the event occurred outside of the overtly political Pet} ofi Circle debates, which spread critical discussion of Hungarian life from academics to the country as a whole. This would be a model for Kornai’s life: rigorous scholarship dedicated to truth and relevance, but framed outside of direct political involvement. In other respects Kornai was a typical 1956 Hungarian intellectual. As an energetic and dedicated Party member Kornai learned economics as a journalist for the official paper Szabad Ne´p (Free People). As for many others, Party legitimacy eroded and then dissolved following Stalin’s death in 1953 and the release of Hungarian political prisoners testifying to a life of lies, terror, and intimidation. Led first by journalists, playwrights, and poets—many who were earlier Party darlings of the most Stalinist regime outside of the Soviet Union, this revolution of truth came from within, with critical petitions, articles, and speeches initiated through the Party itself. Kornai’s first critique of centralized planning was a similarly rational and ferocious internal response to years of faked economic results (none knowingly by him), mismanaged industries, overwork, and induced poverty. Like other Hungarian intellectuals, Kornai was at that time not anti-socialist, just anti-Party, a distinction misunderstood outside the iron curtain. Overcentralization identified systemic failures without rejecting socialist economies as a whole, and it BOOK REVIEWS 413