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Knowledge and Power in State Socialism: Statistical Conventions and Housing Policy in the GDR

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 April 2009

Jay Rowell
Jay Rowell
Affiliation:
Groupe de sociologie politique européenne, Institut d'Etudes Politiques, Strasburg
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Extract

Since the late 1970s, the historiography of State socialist regimes in Central Europe has been largely structured by an opposition between a “top-down” political history and a more “bottom-up” social history, leaving the analysis of public policy in a sort of no-man's land between politics and society. Without competitive elections, freedom of expression, or interest-group mobilization or participation, most determinants of policy routinely studied in Western democracies are inoperative. Furthermore, given that State socialist regimes and centralized economic planning appear to be historical dead ends, what can be learned today from the study of this political experiment? In this article on housing policy in the GDR, I will argue that the question of knowledge, its construction, its circulation, and its uses are at least as essential to the intelligibility of these regimes as the study of ideology and repression.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Policy History , Volume 19 , Issue 3 , July 2007 , pp. 345 - 365
Copyright
Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 2007

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References

Notes

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26. Commission, 13 June 1950. MAL STVuR (1) 483.

27. Commission, 18 June 1951. MAL STVuR (1) 485.

28. MAL STVuR (1) 2593.

29. The writer manages to keep the exclusive use of his apartment. MALSTVuR (1) 2593.

30. Commission, 15 February 1952. MAL STVuR (1) 487.

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42. Ibid.

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