Abstrakt
The paper explores representations of economic reform in Czechoslovakia immediately before and after the fall of the centrally planned economy in 1989/90. By which means was the concept of fast economic transition towards a liberal market setting mediated into the academic as well as public sphere? How did it get wide public consent? In the first part the paper analyzes the Czechoslovak academic discussion about Perestroika in the late 1980s, where the concept of a fast liberal transition was cast by a distinct group of younger scholars as the only possible way of reforming the socialist economy.
They had been trained especially by Paul A. Samuelson's canonic textbook Economics, which presented this discipline nearly as a natural science with universal standards.
Immediately after 1989/90, when some of these scholars took executive positions within the new Czechoslovak government, the at first purely economic ways of reasoning merged with particular images of the national past, creating a mixture of liberal economic knowledge and national exceptionalism.