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

Abstract

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.