Course Content
Browse classes:
- Staging of modernity, invention of the social and the productive failures
- The European/North Atlantic ‘Social Question’: the technicization and pluralization of social reform
- Borderlands, Peripheries, Colonies: The Staging of Modernity
- The Land is the Country!: Romanian revolutionaries, the „ghost of communism”, and the „terrible ghost” of Russia
- The Issue of all Issues: Russian Anarchists in Nineteenth Century Romania
- Cholera, Health for All, and Nation Building
- Racial Degeneracy and Demographic Anti-Semitism: C. Istrati
- The bacteriological state and the last wave of cholera: Victor Babeș
- Narodniks and Marxists: Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea
- The nationalization of the social question: C. Stere
- The Romanian Association for the Advancement and Spread of Sciences, the National Exhibition, and a Peasant Revolt
- The Emergence of Sociology: The Gusti School
Complete Bibliography:
The Emergence of Sociology: The Gusti School
After the end of the war, sociology emerged as a think tank and, latter on, a full blown disciplinary science. The new science, a self proclaimed scientia militans, promised both to modernize the nation, by solving the huge problems the new state faced, and to provide legitimacy for nation building. Around this rather hazy perspective that tried to articulate the social and the national in a project centered on social science and expertise, D. Gusti and V. Madgearu were able to assemble most of the reformist voices and projects of the new Romania. At least for a time, Gusti was able to convince the political and administrative state elites that his empirical sociology, coupled with some theory of the social-national will could be harnessed for a concrete nation-building project. This success was based on the marginalization, cooptation and partial instrumentalization of the large wave of socialist-inspired reformist discourses that were a great part of the after-1918 Romanian reform projects. The Gustian strategy was not to directly confront the socialisms of many kinds that informed social reform in the late 1910s and early 1920s but to circumvent and transform them into partial and minor versions of a major science of reform: the monographical sociologia militans.
Mandatory:
- Rostas Z (2005) Atelierul gustian: O abordare organizațională [The Gustian Laboratory: An Organizational Approach]. Bucharest: Tritonic. [fragments];
- Cotoi, C “The Geopolitical Turn in Interwar Romanian Sociology and Geography: From Social Reform to Population Exchange Plans”, History of the Human Sciences, 32(2), 2019: 76-100.
Recommended:
- Gusti, D. (1919) “Realitate, știință și reformă socială: Câteva indicațiuni asupra metodei.” Arhiva pentru Știință și Reformă Socială I (1);
- Gusti, D. (1937) “Ştiinţa naţiunii”, Sociologie românească, II, 2-3, p. 49-59.