Abstract:
Recent historiography of the former Soviet Bloc has been torn between adopting versus outright contesting the conceptual apparatus introduced by supporters of the totalitarianism theory.  Despite their different settings and the multifarious types of data they attempt to accommodate, historians raise analogous sets of questions, and propose novel social theories in their respective answers. This major axis of debate about how to interpret and explain actors’ actions or events in the former Soviet Bloc has been quite apparent in investigations led by the Potsdam school of historiography, interested in capturing people’s lives in the former DDR (see Thomas Lindenberger, Neither Consent nor Opposition: Eigen-Sinn, or How to Make Sense of Compliance and Self-Assertion under Communist Domination, 2022).

I argue that characterizations of various normative orders in social ontology help us highlight that the historians’ concern is about what has to be true of their background institutions (e.g., those whose norms emerge and/or are designed spontaneously by actors) in order for these to play a role in explaining events and situations.

Short bio:
Manuela Ungureanu is an associate professor of philosophy at UBC Okanagan. Born in Romania, she holds a PhD from McGill University, and has received her BA from the University of Bucharest. Her research areas include social epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of social sciences. She has a research interest in communication technologies and their impact on higher education systems in Eastern Europe during the communist regimes. Manuela Ungureanu teaches courses in philosophy of mind and language, epistemology, philosophy of social sciences and literacy studies.