A Dictionary of Political Economy

A dictionary is the most confident form a body of thought can take. An argument invites reply; a definition does not. It states what a word means, closes the entry, and moves to the next letter.

That was the ambition here: to fix, in alphabetical order and in flat declarative prose, the settled meaning of every category a Soviet economist was permitted to use. The publishers' note is precise about the pedigree - entries refer back to the Collected Works of Marx, Engels and Lenin, cross-references are marked, and the whole is a closed system pointing at itself and at the canon it treats as scripture.

As a reference work it is genuinely useful, and it is the companion piece to the teaching volumes on this list. Where the Rumyantsev course sets out the doctrine as a narrative, this gives it entry by entry: the categories of value and surplus value, the forms of capital and rent, the apparatus of planning, the economic laws of socialism, and the vocabulary of the world economy.

The date of the thought is 1981 rather than the imprint year - this is the second Russian edition, and its furniture is entirely late Brezhnev: developed socialism, the tenth and eleventh five-year plans, and a capitalist world still defined by the oil shock. There is no perestroika here and no hint of it coming.

A monument raised at the moment the thing it monumentalised had stopped growing.

Edited by Professor M. I. Volkov.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.