Dictatorship, State Planning, and Social Theory in the German Democratic Republic

This book examines the way communist East Germany worked from the point of view of its experts in law, economics, philosophy and cybernetics. The state-socialist countries aimed for a post-capitalist modernization, which they hoped to achieve by way of dictatorship. This failed combination of dictatorship and social transformation contains lessons that remain relevant today.

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The introduction of state planning and party dictatorship dramatically altered the environment for social theory in the German Democratic Republic. But social thought did not disappear. By the mid-1950s, East German social theorists discovered the basic contradictions of state socialism that would eventually lead to its collapse: the inability of the plan to function without markets and its inability to permit markets; the inability of the party-state to guarantee the rule of law and yet also the need for a regular system of rules in a modern industrial society; and the contradictory philosophical claims of a Marxist-Leninist philosophy that rejected idealism, and Marxist-Leninist dogma with its idealistic claim to know the laws of social modernization. Making use of archival sources, Caldwell examines the articulation of these analyses, their subsequent suppression by party authorities in the late 1950s, and their return under the guise of cybernetics in the 1960s.