This work is Chicago sociologist Andreas Glaeser's attempt to reformulate the theory of social institutions and use it to offer a more adequate explanation of the collapse of East German state socialism in 1989 than others have put forward to date. He does this with the instruments of what he calls “political epistemology,” in other words, the question of the fundamental principles of social orders from the perspective of the sociology of knowledge: “Unlike the classical philosophical discipline from which it borrows the latter half of its name, political epistemology […] investigates how, in an effort to orient themselves in the world, historically, socially, and culturally situated people actually form and interrogate what to them appears as valid understanding” of the social order (p. XXV). His theoretically complex line of argument combines the sociology of knowledge of Mannheim and Foucault with the classical institutional theory of Marx, Weber, and Elias, as well as Meadian and Wittgensteinian pragmatism and speech-act theory. “Thus it develops a distinctive, process-oriented analytic focusing on the generation, maintenance and transformation of people's understandings and their dialectical relations to political institutions” (p. XXVI).

The analytical core of his argument lies in a dialectic process of creation, stability, and change—and with the empirical test case of East Germany, the collapse—of these institutions as the product of “understandings” about their existence and legitimacy: “Understandings where certain shape actions that in concatenation with the reaction of others become institutions in repetition. In form of social relationships, and by shaping the likelihood that certain kinds of actions will fail or succeed, as well as by triggering or suppressing memories, institutions in turn create the environment in which understandings are validated positively or negatively” (p. XVIII f.).

In reconstructing the influences that shape these understandings, Glaeser puts special emphasis on a holistic view that goes beyond rational processes of deliberation and includes “emotive” and “kinesthetical” factors (e.g., the sensory perception of dilapidated older neighborhoods in East German cities and its influence on the self-perception of the opposition, or the emotional anchoring of foe images in the minds of communist functionaries). The result is a broad biographical approach that takes into account family and generational contexts as well as the social inclusion and exclusion mechanisms in educational systems and the working world.

Glaeser examines how these various understandings work in a historical context by analyzing the collapse of the communist social order. The SED's increasing inability to act and the formation of organized opposition groups in the 1980s are the focus of his attention. He has reconstructed these understandings with the help of interviews conducted in Berlin in the late 1990s and early 2000s. A group of twenty-five former officers from the Ministry for State Security, who banded together in an “insider committee,” were his representatives of the old regime. On the side of the opposition he found sixteen former members of dissident groups. Finally, there were three interviews with Stasi informers.

Glaeser impressively elaborates the formative power of the communist worldview, which—starting with the claim of the Marxist classics to have discerned the laws of history and worked out the scientific basis of them—developed over time into a strict discipline. It gave state functionaries clear instructions for self-positioning which they ultimately internalized. According to Glaeser, this resulted in a blockage of these understandings vis-à-vis the necessary adaptation and reform of social institutions: “By nourishing socialism's ethics of absolute finality, the party state's efforts to create a monolithic intentionality effectively prevented the party-state machinery from learning in a bottom up way through a systematic engagement with and the recalcitrance of the world to human description. […] Since corroboration was typically conducted in such a way that the result could only affirm preexisting understandings (at least in all areas that were considered ‘ideologically sensitive’), experience could not be mobilized to challenge dogma” (p. 523).

On the other hand, this set of understandings “produced” dissidents from the most varied social and political camps who—often without any direct intention of doing so—ended up in conflict with the system.

Glaeser's approach proves fruitful, as he explains the long-standing stability and the sudden disintegration of the institutional order of state socialism through the self-understanding of predominantly social protagonists. He seeks answers to the kind of questions posed in recent years by Alexei Yurchak with regard to the Soviet Union, or cultural historians such as Jan Palmowski and Georg Wagner-Kyora with regard to the GDR, using performance or speech-act theories or the question of “constructed identities” (though Glaeser seems only to know the work of Yurchak). Glaeser restricts this cultural-studies approach, however, by virtue of the groups he chooses to investigate. He essentially follows the standard dichotomy of Stasi “perpetrators” and “resistance fighters,” a perspective that was controversial at the time of his interviews and has more or less become obsolete nowadays. It is the “common people,” who were neither representatives of the communist system nor had much in common with the organized opposition and whose understandings underwent a shift to revolutionary upheaval, that he loses sight of in the process. Another problematic aspect is his choice of the interview method for these two groups of people, who have served as the principal witnesses and main authorities since 1990, being repeatedly asked to comment on their experiences, and have developed a rather rigid canon of retrospective self-interpretations and narratives which, though perhaps interesting as a phenomenon of postcommunist memory culture, nonetheless offers a distorted picture of the understandings of the 1980s. Thus, the Stasi officers invariably underline the reputable motives of their career work with the secret police as well as their increasing awareness of a crisis which, due to the inflexible framework of the Marxist-Leninist worldview, never led to a discussion of reforms of the kind that was “actually” necessary (p. 396).

There is one decisive factor that the officers and, with them, the author is silent about, one that is essential for a concept of formative influences enhanced by an emotive and kinesthetic perspective: their understandings as secret police agents whose lifeworld not only consisted of ideology and observation of society, but of biographical molding and the day-to-day practice of “battling the enemy” in which arrests and covert attacks were at least an ever-present option. A proper analysis would require us to know if in 1989 they still “hated” their subjects, as their occupational understanding in effect required, if they were reluctant, dutiful, or passionate about threatening people, locking them up in prison cells, or subjecting them to psychological terror. The newer sociology and social psychology of violence (e.g., of Harald Welzer or Randall Collins) offers practicable analytical concepts here. The same goes for the small group of dissidents who were massively disappointed with their sudden devaluation as representatives of society after reunification and who reacted with (quite divergent) reinterpretations of their roles up to 1989.

The real strength of this volume is its sociological generalizations about the functionality of social orders. With regard to the downfall of socialist systems it offers a range of insights into the “non-simultaneity” in the minds of communist cadres and dissidents as a key to understanding the contrast between system representatives' dwindling willingness to act and their opponents' increasing determination. Given the complexity of prerevolutionary and revolutionary events of 1989, this approach certainly has its limits, neglecting in particular key aspects of the worlds in which all East Germans thought and acted, Stasi officers included.