On the passing of an extraordinary man, Aron Katsenelinboigen
By Vladimir Shlapentokh

If I had to write about an ordinary outstanding scholar, my task would not be very difficult. However, Aron Katsenelinboigen who died suddenly on July 30 - he fell down on the sidewalk near his house in New Jersey returning home from lunch with a professor of theology--- was not ordinary in any sense of the word. Of this one can be most easily convinced by surveying Aron' scholarly career.

If one were to judge him only by his academic degrees and the positions he held, Aron indeed was a "normal " successful scientist, both in the Soviet Union and in the United States, where he emigrated in 1973. In the USSR, he headed a leading department of the Central Economic-Mathematical Institute (CEMI), one of the most prestigious and progressive research outfits in Moscow at that time. He was also in his last three Soviet years a professor of economics at Moscow University -- not a mean achievement, even for an outstanding Jew, since that institution was well-known for its anti-Semitic hiring policy -- and to boot Aron was not a Party member. In the USA, just 7 years after arriving on these shores, he attained full professorship at the most prestigious educational business establishment in the world-the Wharton school -at the University of Pennsylvania, from which he retired only one year ago. Across the entire span of history of emigration into the U.S., not too many émigré social scientists - mathematicians and physicists being another story -- could boast of holding such elevated ranks in the scholarly communities of both countries, old and new. One of Aron's old friends, philosopher Alexander Zinoviev, once observed that "those who were successful in the Soviet Union, will also be successful in America, and vice versa," and Aron's life seems to have borne this out.

The core of Aron's personality as a scholar lied in his principled refusal to behave like 99 percent of his colleagues who stick to those activities which brought them recognition and material comforts in the past and promise to do the same in the future. All his life Aron looked for new fields of intellectual inquiry that could potentially jeopardize his academic standing among his colleagues and the well-being of his family, his wife Zhenia and the two boys, Grigorii and Alexander, all very dear to him.

This indomitable yearning for new subjects to study and new heights to scale, whatever the cost, was very much evident to his awed colleagues even back in the Soviet Union. In the late 50s Aron got acquainted with the revolutionary works of Leonid Kantorovich, the future Nobel prize winner, on optimal programming which offered a new approach to economic analysis. By that time Aron had already established himself as an expert on industrial economics. However, without hesitation he left this area and joined a new and unorthodox economic-mathematical school, a transition which required that he learn some mathematics. In the 1960s, Aron became a major force behind the efforts in the building "the System of Optimal Functioning of the Economy" (SOFE) which promised the Soviet leadership improvement in the faltering system of economic planning. Aron and his collaborators paid special interest to study of the "goal function", or criterion, necessary for optimization of the Soviet economy. They offered as such a criterion the longevity of life in Soviet society, proposing to evaluate the importance of each unit of resources and human efforts depending on their contribution to the increase of life expectancy in the country, a very controversial but bold and definitely very humanistic idea.

Aron's prestige among the devotees of the new school was immense and the books which he coauthored were considered virtual primers by those who wanted to join the new trend. One of these opuses was called "Methodological Problems of Optimal Planning of Socialist Economy, (together with Iurii .Ovsienko and Efim .Faerman, both his main collaborators in the 60s). (1966)

Aron was not only a theoretical engine of the new school, he was also its highest administrator at the CEMI, and in this position was able to bring on board a large number of talented mathematicians. (many of them are now full professors at the best American universities) This ability to gather around him the best minds in the profession revealed Aron's rare human quality - willingness to support and encourage anybody who had a creative spark, however small. Whatever we may think of that school as well as Aron' s ideas today , in the Soviet times it definitely served to undermine a lot of the official Soviet economic science and its obsolete Marxist foundation.

At the very moment when his reputation as a leading Soviet economist was at last solidly established, Aron made a drastic turn in his scholarly interests. Involvement with mathematical models of the economy had fostered in him and in several of his Soviet and American colleagues something close to infatuation with systems analysis, a new discipline which promised to provide the tools for describing the most diverse phenomena -social, biological and even physical - in the same rigorous scientific manner.

By the end of the 60s, Aron became firmly convinced of the primacy of theory in science and regarded empirical research only as an ancillary instrument. It's possible that this commitment to abstract conceptual speculation derived in part from Marx's idolatry of grand theories which was widely shared by Soviet intellectuals, including those of a dissident bent, as well as from the old Jewish tradition of Talmudic exegesis. Among various topics of systems theory it was values that attracted Aron's special attention, and as far back as 1972 he published an article, "Systems Analysis and the Problem of Values." The intellectual distance that Aron already covered by that time can be glimpsed from comparing the title of this piece with those of the first articles he wrote in the 50's, "Computing Inventory Requirements for Mass Production Lines" (1950) and "Prospects for Labor Productivity Increases in Ceramics Industry." (1954). In any case, even prior to emigration, Aron's bold and original approach to Soviet economic issues filled his Moscow colleagues with amazement and admiration.

He came to the USA as a well-known Soviet economist and could continue to work in the field of Soviet economics. American Sovietologists were quite ambivalent about him as well as about other social scientists coming from behind the "Iron Curtain." They could not deny that Aron knew the Soviet economy much better that they did (before entering the academic world Aron worked in the industry and had a first-hand experience of it which his American colleagues obviously lacked) but they could try and alleviate their professional unease and keep intact their egos by telling themselves that they were in possession of a superior methodology. Still, a number of them helped him, a refugee, to establish himself in the American academia. His first years, as everyone expected, were dedicated to Soviet economic research. He published two books on the subject, "Studies in Soviet Economic Planning," Sharpe, 1978, and. "Economic Thought and Political Power in the USSR," Pergamon, 1980.

Otherwise, in his studies of the Soviet economy Aron focused on issues almost totally ignored by his American colleagues, in particular, the total militarization of the Soviet economy. His article "Color markets in the Soviet Union" (Soviet Studies, vol. 29, no. 1, Jan. 1977) has become a classic. It demonstrated the pervasiveness of informal economic activity when western scholars' focus had long been on the formal planning structure. This article drew many citations and helped start a stream of studies on the second economy in the USSR, a field that flourished in the 1980s.

His publication "Integration of Foreign and Economic Policy in the Soviet Union" (The Papers of the Peace Science Society (International), vol. 28, 1978) went largely unnoticed, but proved to be remarkably prescient. In the 1990s, it became a commonplace that the Soviet economy was heavily militarized, and that military economic factors were important both for the way it worked and for its eventual demise. Yet one would have been hard pressed to find much on the military sector and its impact in Western textbooks and scholarly monographs at the time. Aron's article outlined the degree of militarization of the Soviet economy in terms that were unprecedented at the time, and would not be heard again until many years later.

But even in that period Aron did not lose track of systems analysis and especially the role of values in society, and in his research of the Soviet economy went far beyond the narrow bounds of the discipline - again, quite an accomplishment, in my view. For example, in his new publications he discussed at length the character of the Soviet ideology which, contrary to the conventional Sovietological wisdom, he described as a "cocktail" containing the elements of both Marxism and primal Russian nationalism. Also, unlike most Sovietologists, Aron paid a lot attention to the imperial tradition in Russian and Soviet history and was quite skeptical (see his book, "The Soviet Union: :Empire, Nation, and the System," Transaction,1990 ) that perestroika would be able to overcome this tradition of imperialism, xenophobia and, in particular, anti-Semitism which he acutely experienced growing up on the outskirts of Moscow.

Watching the economic reforms in Russia in the early 90's, Aron was very critical of its authors like Yegor Gaidar, rebuking them for lack of a general theoretical appreciation of the Russian society and for disregarding the peculiarities of the Russian culture. He was also amazed how the reformers underestimated the effect of the military-industrial complex on thwarting an easy transformation of the Russian economy and how they failed to see the inadequacy of a pure market approach to the reform efforts. By the end of the 80's, Aron published several articles dealing with perestroika, Gorbachev's personality, Solzhenitsyn's views, and anti-Semitism

However, the Russian developments in the 90s occupied only a small part of Aron's time .By then he was principally involved in systems analysis, a love carried forward from the Soviet times. The idea born back in Moscow that a good abstract theory would permit him to make a great contribution to any area of science, including ones in which he was not formally trained, seems to have remained deep within him until his last day. This was combined with a total lack of reflexive respect for any authority in any field, scholarly or political. It should be added that Aron was an ardent advocate of pluralism and he did not believe anybody could lay claim to ultimate truth on any complex issue. At the beginning of his intellectual journey in the USA he still might have looked like an economist fond of fresh approaches, this time not only toward the centrally planned Soviet economy, but to a market one as well. As a popular teacher at the Wharton school he offered to his students a new perspective on management in America, which endlessly fascinated many of them and made some his staunch admirers. Aron suggested to his students, including professional managers, that they should reject the traditional view that all business decisions must be made on the basis of statistical analysis of a large body of objective data. He argued instead for the use of "subjective probability" which incorporated more factors and provided a better fit with indeterminism of real life. He insisted that there was a subclass of complex decisions that was basically unique and that their effectiveness depended not a little on the personality of those who made them and had to carry them out. Aron made much of predisposition - his favorite concept - of people to behave in one way and not the other because human beings do not control their genetic, personality, or cultural traits which make them act in certain ways, even ones harmful to them. He told his audience that in chess - a good game to model the economy - it is the specific personality type of a player that accounts for his major positional choices in non-trivial situations - and the same is true of top managers. .All these and other ideas the reader can find in his "The Concept of Indeterminism & Its Applications; Economics,| Social Systems, Ethics, Artificial Intelligence & Aesthetics. Greenwood Publishing Group, 1997, as well as in many other publications and speeches at the conferences organized by Aron at the University of Pennsylvania.

A firm belief in his personal intellectual mission in this world, in the power of theory which was his domain, and in a positive assessment of his ideas in the future, coupled with his disregard of the critics unable to understand his views, had pushed Aron far beyond the confines of economics. He spent a lot of time on applying his ideas to aesthetics (see his book, "A Conceptual Understanding of Beauty. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2003 ),literary analysis ( he published articles on Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky) and to biology. He was not at all afraid to publish a book in which he discussed his novel and non-orthodox concept of cancer ( Evolutionary Change; Toward a Systemic Theory of Development and Maldevelopment. Gordon & Breach Publishing Group, 1997). In challenging authority, Aron was not even afraid of making critical observations of God. .In his last scholarly book, ("The Developing God," PublishAmerica, 2005) Aron proposed to refrain from considering God an omniscient entity. In Aron 's opinion, which he claimed had a deep affinity with the Jewish mind-set, God was a being who made mistakes and who corrected them upon accumulating the relevant data.

It is not at all surprising that Aron's extraordinary and charming personality aroused great interest and huge sympathy among legions of people who came into contact with him. He was one of the most popular intellectuals in Moscow. His home run by a kind, hospitable and intelligent Zhenia, his wife, was frequented by the most prominent figures in the Soviet capital. In a way, his place epitomized a refined and exciting Soviet culture of the post-Stalinist period. In America Aron also came to be surrounded by many interesting people but the height of his influence, as I see it, still dates back to Moscow, to the times of the decaying Soviet empire..

Aron was liked by all sorts of people - and that love was mutual. He was not only a most original person whom I have ever met but also an extremely kind one, always ready along with his Zhenia to help anybody who was in dire straits or just in doldrums. Once, being a compulsive empirical sociologist, I calculated how many people in Russia got money from the Katsenelinboigens or postal packages, and how many people from Russia as émigrés or visitors stayed overnight at their home, and how many people found jobs with their help, and how many were invited to lunch for career counseling or for beefing up their faith in America - Aron tenderly loved his "new country."

There was a niche for anyone. With Aron's passing we lose a personality that was unique in numerous ways. Alas, since there is no chance to clone him in the next hundred years, we who knew him have to thank fate for being very lucky.