The Technical Intelligentsia and the East German Elite

The Technical Intelligentsia and the East German Elite: Legitimacy and Social Change in Mature Communism by Thomas A. Baylis examines the deliberate cultivation of engineers, scientists, economists, and managers in the German Democratic Republic and their role in shaping both political authority and regime transformation. Part I reconstructs the postwar creation and socialization of this technical intelligentsia, analyzing how workplaces were politicized and how professional values translated into political attitudes. Part II turns to elite recruitment: who advanced from this stratum, the criteria and career patterns involved, and how technocrats influenced policy once in power. Framed against enduring debates about “technocracy,” Baylis contends that simplistic visions of managerial rule are untenable, but technocratic influence—bound to questions of legitimacy and authority—is real, if elusive, in communist systems.

In a broader comparative perspective, the book contrasts “bureaucratic communism” with more “pluralistic” experiments, arguing that both remain fluid, unstable departures from Stalinism. Baylis highlights participation, expertise, and organizational demands as potential catalysts for political change, while explicitly rejecting technological determinism. Methodologically, he synthesizes East German party-state documents, West German scholarship, refugee surveys such as the 1958 Infratest study, and informal interviews, while carefully noting limitations of access and interpretation. The result is a nuanced political analysis of how conscious social engineering encounters resistant social realities, and how that dynamic reshapes authority, policy, and legitimacy in East Germany’s mature communist order.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1974.