DICTATORSHIP, STATE PLANNING, AND SOCIAL THEORY IN THE GERMAN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC.
Publisher: CAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS
Published: 2003
Place of publication: CAMBRIDGE
Language: und
Number of pages: 220
Description: "The introduction of centralized state planning and party dictatorship dramatically altered the environment for social theory in communist East Germany. This book examines the way the German Democratic Republic (GDR) worked from the point of view of its leading experts in law, economics, philosophy, and cybernetics. Like other state-socialist countries, the GDR aimed for a postcapitalist modernization, which it hoped to achieve by way of dictatorship. Caldwell makes use of newly available archival sources to demonstrate how state-socialist politics and social theory both merged and collided. From the 1950s onward, figures such as the economist Fritz Behrens, the jurist Hermann Klenner, and the philosopher Ernst Bloch struggled with the basic contradictions of state socialism that eventually led to its collapse. The plan, for example, forbade markets yet could not function without them; the party-state subordinated the rule of law to its own decrees yet also called for a regular and reliable system of rules; Marxist-Leninist philosophy rejected idealism yet made its own idealist claim to know the purported laws of historical development. With a clear explication of basic concepts in Marxist economics, this book is an introduction to the elements of state socialism that its leading proponents saw as most important."--Jacket.