Antinomies of Knowledge Production and Social Sciences During Socialism

Abstract

Andreas Glaeser (2011:XV) defined state socialism as an ‘unacknowledged attempt to perform a revolutionary self-fulfilling prophecy’. For Glaeser, state socialism failed because its elites failed to produce adequate understandings of the everyday operations of socialism so as to device timely reforms of the system. In short, socialism came tumbling down because of an epistemic failure. Irrespective of the validity of Glaeser’s conclusion it has the merit that it raises the point about the generation and certification of knowledge about the social life in socialism. How was this knowledge produced, by what means, to what ends, in which institutional settings and what mechanisms of feedback did it generate? This issue takes knowledge production during socialism and its instantiations in various institutional settings as its starting point and seeks to trace its antinomies. The socialist state apparatus was a systematic producer of knowledge. The bureaucratic machine often employed the methods of the social sciences to gather and classify information, hypothesise contending interpretation, and suggest policy prescriptions. A vast array of activities benefited from the integration of these methods in the everyday state operations. Minute knowledge was needed in economic and spatial planning, or in demographical, educational, and health policies. Concurrently, the secret police also deployed observational techniques and made use of field notes that had a strong resemblance with those of the ethnographers. At the same time, the social sciences per se produced a vast array of analysis of the very same society. During the four decades of socialism in Eastern Europe there were significant variations in the type, quantity, and quality of scientific literature produced. These variations were strongly interlinked with the state apparatus’ needs for knowledge and societal projects. But the knowledge