the British economic historian whose three-position taxonomy of NEP's failure shaped the historiographical debate
Why did NEP fail? I should like to distinguish three ways in which this question has been answered: rational abandonment, irrational or political decision, and constrained choice.
Mark Harrison is a British economic historian who studied economics at Cambridge and modern history at Oxford, and taught at the University of Warwick from 1975, researching the Soviet economy for over four decades. His 1980 paper 'Why Did NEP Fail?' identified three positions in the historiographical debate (rational abandonment, irrational or political decision, and constrained choice), a taxonomy that has structured assessments of NEP ever since. His work expanded into the economics of warfare, state secrecy, and coercion, earning the Alec Nove Prize for Accounting for War (1996) and producing Secret Leviathan (2023), a landmark study of information control under Soviet communism.
Career Timeline
- 1974Temporary Lecturer, Department of Economics, University of Warwick
- 1975Lecturer, Department of Economics, University of Warwick
- 1985Senior Lecturer, Department of Economics, University of Warwick
- 1993Reader, Department of Economics, University of Warwick
- 1998Professor of Economics, University of Warwick
- 2004Distinguished Visiting Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University
- 2019Emeritus Professor, University of Warwick; Fellow of the British Academy (2020)