ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Making Economies: Planning and Economic Knowledge, 1930 - 1980

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

This session brings approaches from the history of science into the study of mid-twentieth-century economic planning. Since the 1980s, historians and sociologists of science have insisted that scientific phenomena are constructed, not simply discovered. Part of that construction involves building theories, models, conceptual frameworks, simulations, and other forms of representation. Yet scholars have also argued that much of modern science also involves remaking the world to render it more legible, including everything from standardized organisms to systems of classification and data collection. Scientific knowledge emerges from a suite of interlocking practices of both representation and intervention (Hacking 1983). Seen in this light, the science of economic planning involves “making” an economy in a double-sense: forming it in specific ways (to make it more legible and amenable to intervention) and then attempting to direct the resulting system.

Our session explores this theme through three papers. First, Malgorzata Mazurek considers the intersection of population science and economic development in Eastern Europe in the 1930s, where “planned migration,” cast in the language of development and demographic balance, became a strategy for creating ethnic homogenization. Second, Max Ehrenfreund describes how Nazi Germany turned to cost accounting to undergird its planning efforts during the Second World War, pushing farmers, artisans, and shopkeepers to employ bookkeeping practices that continued well after the Third Reich had collapsed. Finally, Katharina Kreuder-Sonnen examines the construction of “modern” industrial workers and managers in Nigeria from the 1960s through the 1980s, a process that involved combining Western concepts and social-science tools (testing, surveys, etc.) with “traditional” Nigerian values.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Tom Stapleford, University of Notre Dame

Commentator

• Verena Halsmayer, University of Vienna

Individual Presentations

• Interwar Population Science and the “Right to Migrate”: How Science and International Organizations Normalized Ethnic Cleansing as a Tool of Economic Development - Malgorzata Mazurek, Columbia University

• Cost Accounting and Economic Planning in Nazi Germany - Max Ehrenfreund, Kenyon College

• Creating 'African‘ economic subjects: Manpower development in Nigeria, 1960-1990 - Katharina Kreuder-Sonnen, University of Cologne