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Based on an analysis of the production and uses of statistics in housing policy in the GDR, the article aims to specify the link between knowledge and power in state socialist regimes. The article demonstrates the importance of taking into account cognitive tools in understanding sociologically the successive shifts in public policy. If this analysis shows the potential of using ordinary concepts and tools of political sociology, it also shows how the specific configuration of the regime and the monopolization of production and uses of statistical knowledge contributed to breaking the circularity between knowledge and action in the 1970’s and 1980’s.