The Social Context of Dissent: A Response to Barnett and Samuels

In my note on dissent (2004), I emphasized that heterodoxy and dissent had to be defined socially. Given that crucial elements of the social context differ from one society to another, it follows that the meaning and significance of dissent may vary too. Barnett (2006) has pointed out a conclusion I should have drawn explicitly: that my suggestions for thinking about dissent make sense only in Western economics. In the former Soviet Union, as he points out, dissent in economics could not be understood apart from the political situation. The examples he cites illustrate some of the ways in which dissent in Soviet economics differed from that in the West, where there was no officially sanctioned orthodoxy comparable to Marxism-Leninism (or rather to what the Soviet authorities chose to call by that name) from which economists wished either safely to signal their dissent or to which they wished, despite their dissent, to be seen to adhere. We see here, it might be argued, a simple difference between two types of society.