ABSTRACT
Taking communist Albania as a case study, this contribution investigates the role that highly educated professionals, like engineers, agronomists, and doctors – often identified through the generic term “technocrats” – played in promoting the secularist policies of Tirana's communist regime. Until now, scholarly work has not devoted the necessary attention to this group, which, in many ways, embodied the triumph of a “scientific” understanding of the world and rational skepticism about the existence of God. Through the technocrats, this contribution will also investigate the interaction between the discourses and the material, technological, and economic transformations that took place in Albania under communism, in an effort to pay more attention to the engineering of society, nature, and economy, and the intermingling of ideological, economic, and technological dynamics. This approach allows us to understand both atheism and religious reawakening in the late 20th century – quite often accompanied by fundamentalist, right-wing conservatives, and antimodern projects. The Albanian communist regime's efforts to forge new subjects and radically alter existing social and economic structures were not separate spheres but rather part of the same modernizing project. Subjectivity is not detached from the socio-economic context. It is necessary to overcome the culture-economy dichotomy that still defines a good part of contemporary historiography. To grasp the degree of erosion of religious practices in everyday life, besides the role of the Party and its structures, it is also critical to analyze the role of the technocrats in promoting a scientific outlook of the world.
