Resisting Narrative Closure: The Comparative and Historical Imagination of Evsey Domar

Abstract

This article explores the peculiar approach to narrative argumentation taken by the MIT economist Evsey Domar (1914–97). Combining biography and textual analysis of his academic work reveals that Cold War themes permeated Domar's later research in comparative economic systems, Soviet economics, and economic history—and yet, Domar employed these themes in ways that challenge traditional understandings of postwar American social science. Against the heady partisanship and epistemic self-confidence that characterized his milieu, Domar offered conclusions that emphasized ambiguity, complexity, and open-endedness. He achieved this, the article argues, by thinking not only comparatively, but also historically and speculatively. This article takes a journey through a number of Domar's historical and speculative narratives to demonstrate that what Domar was ultimately doing in many of his works was resisting normative, literary, and scientific closure.