Power and Knowledge Under Communism

Book examines the transformation of economic and sociological knowledge under Hungarian state socialism from the late 1940s to the mid-1970s.It argues that the fate of the social sciences was determined less by episodic repression than by academic regimes asserting political authority through epistemological criteria and professional ethos This book examines the transformation of economics and sociology in Hungary under state socialism as a sequence of epistemic, institutional, and political reconfigurations. Class-relativism yielded an academic regime after 1948 with autonomies destroyed and where science was subordinated to political notions of truth. Inevitably, social knowledge experienced profound crisis under high Stalinism. Reacting to this crisis, New Course policies enabled the re-emergence of empiricism as a morally, scientifically, and politically viable form of knowledge. Through detailed studies of institutions, patron-client relations, informal communities, purges, and international exchanges, the book shows how social science was reorganized post-1953. The last chapter (on sociology) extends this framework to transsystemic contexts, demonstrating how international exchanges and Cold War academic networks reshaped disciplinary hierarchies and professional strategies within state-socialist Hungary. By linking epistemology, science policy, and professional practices, the book offers a historically grounded account of how knowledge fields were reconstructed within—and constrained by—state-socialist governance.