Abstract
This paper proposes a sociology of state socialism. It does so by discussing the place of state socialism within the debates on modernity and postmodernity and by reassessing the possibilities of so called biographical research in the field of post/communist studies.
Then the paper outlines a theoretical and analytical framework for making the communists' power problematic from sociological point of view. Such a perspective is promoted in which the power of the communists is not taken - explicitly or implicitly - as something that explains the logic of life under the communist regime; rather (on the contrary, it is presented as something that needs to be explained.
As such, this approach has been inspired by contemporary sociology of science, particularly by the work of Bruno Latour. By taking the above standpoint, I hope to achieve one important side-effect, namely to (re)establish the phenomena of state socialism as a topic worth of general sociological attention.)