ANTINOMIES OF KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION AND SOCIAL SCIENCES DURING SOCIALISM

Andreas Glaeser (2011:XV) defined state socialism as an ‘unacknowledged attempt to perform a revolutionary self-fulfilling prophecy’. For Glaeser, state socialism failed because its elites failed to produce adequate understandings of the everyday operations of socialism so as to device timely reforms of the system. In short, socialism came tumbling down because of an epistemic failure. Irrespective of the validity of Glaeser’s conclusion it has the merit that it raises the point about the generation and certification of knowledge about the social life in socialism. How was this knowledge produced, by what means, to what ends, in which institutional settings and what mechanisms of feedback did it generate? This issue takes knowledge production during socialism and its instantiations in various institutional settings as its starting point and seeks to trace its antinomies.