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基本説明
New in paperback. Harecover was published in 2003. This book examines how communist East Germany functioned according to the views of its leading experts in law, economics, philosophy, and cybernetics.
Full Description
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.
Contents
List of illustrations; Preface; Acknowledgements; 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, technique and politics after revisionism; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.