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 Land is the Country!: Romanian revolutionaries, the „ghost of communism”, and the „terrible ghost” of Russia
In the story that makes up the substance of this course, the liberal promise of social progress – that was a major part of the creation of social modernity – is seen as a historical discursive apparatus that needs the ‘empty signifier’ of communism. Social revolution could be offered as either a future great promise or a present threatening illusion depending on the debates, projects and plans of the inhabitants of the discursive field. This discursive apparatus neutralized the threat of communism by recognizing its importance and even righteousness – while at the same time stressing its alien character, local inappropriateness and dangerousness. In a balancing game, the liberal middle of social progress and nation building needed both the near past of national humiliation and lack of unity and the far future of socialism as disembodied realities. The immigrant Russian revolutionaries played and were played inside this larger symbolic area, and influenced, mostly in indirect ways, how the ‘social question’ was asked and what kind of interests and expertise were needed for the creation of the local social.
Mandatory:
- Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, London, 1985. (fragments);
- G. Bogdan-Duică, Vieața și opera întâiului țărănist Român: Ion Ionescu dela Brad 1818-1891, (Craiova: Ramuri, 1922).
Recommended:
- Jianu, Angela. A Circle of Friends: Romanian Revolutionaries and Political Exile, 1840-1859. Leiden: Brill, 2011.