Research Catalog

Dictatorship, state planning, and social theory in the German Democratic Republic

Title: Dictatorship, state planning, and social theory in the German Democratic Republic / Peter C. Caldwell.
Author: Caldwell, Peter C.
Publication: Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2003.

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Use in library	HX280.5.A6 C35 2003	Off-site

Details

Description

x, 220 pages : illustrations; 24 cm

Summary

"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.

Subject

Genre/Form

History.

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references (p. 197-214) and index.

Contents

Introduction: Modernization, Modernity, and the Plan -- 1. The Economics of State Socialism: Productivity and the Law of Value -- 2. The Legal Theory of State Socialism: Socialist Legality, the Laws of Historical Development, and the Plan -- 3. Philosophy and State Socialism: Consciousness, Dialectical Materialism, and Hope -- 4. From Planning Metaphysics to Cybernetics: Planning, Technology, and Politics after Revisionism.

ISBN

0521820901
9780521820905

LCCN

2002067680

OCLC

ocm49743668
49743668
SCSB-14693745

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library