The Specter of Market: The World Before and After Post-Socialism

What does it mean to look at the contemporary world and its history through—and beyond—the invention of post-socialism? This workshop begins from the premise that “post-socialism” has not only described the afterlife of socialist societies but has also profoundly re-organized how the West imagines its own past and future. The specter of market reform—the promise and peril of reconciling equality with efficiency—has haunted both sides of the former Iron Curtain.

The Specter of Market: The World Before and After Post-Socialism invites scholars to rethink the intertwined histories of market economies, state planning, transnational industrialization, cultural policies, and social imaginaries across the socialist and capitalist worlds. The workshop seeks to move beyond Cold War binaries—state versus market, socialism versus capitalism, East versus West—to examine the shared infrastructures and visions that shaped twentieth- and twenty-first-century global development.

Western scholarship has traditionally viewed socialist economies through the limiting lens of the Stalinist model and its variations, while in fact there existed diverse socialist economic experiments. Focusing on the long arc from mid-century socialist modernization to the neoliberal globalization of the 1990s and beyond, we explore how distinct yet interconnected models of economic reform—from Yugoslav self-management and Hungarian “goulash socialism” to Chinese market socialism and Western privatization drives—produced new articulations of labor, value, and citizenship.

By bringing together historians, economists, anthropologists, political theorists, and cultural scholars, this workshop asks how market reform became a universal language of modernization—and what critical perspectives might emerge today.

Organized by Odd Arne Westad, Jinyi Chu, and the Council on East Asian Studies