Rationalizing Socialism: Management, Information, and Technocracy in East Germany, 1953-1990

Abstract

This dissertation examines how economists, engineers, and scientists in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) sought to make socialist central planning operational by constructing large-scale information infrastructures. Critics such as F. A. Hayek argued that planned economies were limited by the impossibility of collecting dispersed knowledge. East German designers recognized the same problem but drew a different conclusion. Rather than abandoning central planning, they sought to reorganize the production of economic information itself, aiming to generate standardized, calculable data across the national economy.The study focuses on the development of computer-based information systems in the GDR, particularly the National Economic Information System (VIS), a large-scale computerization project launched in 1964. The VIS aimed to connect enterprises, administrative agencies, and research institutions within a unified network that standardized data, enabled mathematical forecasting, and guided decision making through algorithms. In this framework, computers functioned not simply as calculating devices but as organizing reference points that structured both data and decision processes. Drawing on archival sources from Germany and the United States, the dissertation argues that the core challenge of socialist planning lay less in calculation than in the generation and organization of information. Efforts to build a coherent and closed information system ultimately collided with the constraints of the actual East German economy embedded in the broader world economy. The political economy of the GDR is thus reinterpreted as a tension between the aspiration to construct a closed informational system and the persistent pressures of the world economy.