“Economic Knowledge in Socialism: Forms, Integration, Isolation”

Till Düppe (Université du Québec à Montréal)

In this introductory essay, we present an overview of the different forms of economic knowledge that emerged in Cold War socialist countries. Two partially conflicting epistemic hierarchies apply: the first is the hierarchy inherited from the pre-socialist era that favors formally driven sciences as a model for scientific practice; the second hierarchy is imposed by the imperative of MarxistLeninist political economy, which was driven largely by ideas rather than techniques and was supposed to inform all scientific activities; it required next to an ideological commitment also that all scientific activities result in economic advances in building up a socialist society. In open and implicit debates several disciplines had to redefine their agenda, and renegotiate their disciplinary relationships. In this context, we can observe a mobilization of many disciplines in providing economically relevant knowledge (often summarized under the notion “economic cybernetics”), which even meant a certain methodological eclecticism; the risk to fall into disgrace by the Party system, however, pushed specialization as well as abstraction as a means of protection and thus disintegration of economic knowledge. In addition, a heavy jargon papered over this disintegration of knowledge, and reinforced the isolation of the epistemic sphere from the West. This mobilization, disintegration, and isolation of various forms of economic knowledge was reinforced by the creation of various institutions that brought this knowledge about, and created a fundamental in-transparency of economic knowledge in socialism.

“The Strange “Career” of Scientometrics: East-West Competition and the Coproduction of Knowledge in the Cold War”

Elena Aronova (University of California, Santa Barbara)

This paper focuses on West-East transfer and exchange that shaped the new field called scientometrics – the quantitative analysis of science most prominently associated with citation indices. The term “scientometrics” was adopted by Eugene Garfield as a calque from Russian “naukometriia,” which was, in turn, coined by the champion of Garfield’s Science Citation Index (SCI) in the Soviet Union, Vassilii Nalimov. Using the SCI, which was sent by Garfield to the All-Union Institute of Scientific and Technical Information (VINITI), Nalimov applied Garfield’s method to analyze Soviet science. While Garfield founded his own Institute for Scientific Information modeling it on Soviet VINITI -- regarded with envy by science planners in the US and UK in the 1950s and 1960s -- Nalimov and other researchers at VINITI avidly followed American literature on information technologies, reproducing and further developing ideas and approaches related to information processing. Scientometrics, initially promoted by few peculiar individuals on each side of the “curtain” was legitimized when a journal devoted to new field was established in 1978. The journal epitomized the transnational beginning of the field: printed by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the journal had four editors-in-chief (two Americans, one Soviet and one Hungarian scientist). By following the strange “career” of scientometrics back and forth between the US and USSR, the paper highlights the role of West-East transfers and mutual reinforcements in the development of this field.

“Programming the USSR: Optimization as Political Struggle”

Ivan Boldyrev (University of Bochum)

In the wake of Stalin’s death, many Soviet scientists saw the opportunity to promote the importance of their methods for the engineering of economic prosperity in the socialist state. Leonid Kantorovich (1912-1986) was one of them, and would later stand for the use of mathematical methods in Soviet economics. The established class of the orthodox economists and planners, however, first had to be convinced. Kantorovich was a key activist in academic politics that led to the increasing acceptance of ‘programming’ economic efficiency in the USSR. Many factors were at work, including Kantorovich’s persona, his networks, and academic allies in the rather peculiar Soviet institutions of knowledge. Who and for what reason supported Kantorovich? Who and for what reason was troubled by his approach? And was this discourse unique to the socialist context, or an expression of a shared Cold War spirit?

“The Generation of the GDR: Economists at the Humboldt University of Berlin Caught Between Loyalty and Relevance”

Till Düppe (Université du Québec à Montréal)

The German Democratic Republic (GDR) existed for 41 years. This gave time for a single generation to spend their entire professional lives in this state—namely those born in the early 1930s who carried the hopes of this state. With Karl Mannheim’s notion of generations as a unit in the sociology of knowledge in mind, this essay describes this generation’s typical experiences from the point of view of a particularly telling group: economists at the Humboldt University in Berlin. I present their socialization in Nazi Germany, their formative years in the aftermath of WWII that led to their choice of a politically-driven profession, their studies during the first years of the GDR, when Stalinism was still the dominating dogma, and their commitment to a state career when writing their dissertations and habilitations. Ready to shoulder Honecker’s regime, their daily lives as professors was characterized by continuing attempts to reform teaching and research. In 1989 the ultimate reform transpired, and encompassed the end of the state as well as their professional careers. This narrative historicizes, on an experiential level, a tension often noted in GDR research, that between the ideological and productive functions of knowledge in socialism, that is, between loyalty and relevance.