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Ion Matei Costinescu, On Modernity and Technologies of Nation-Building in the Projects of the Bucharest Sociological School

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Magazine: 11-12 / 2012
Date: 2012
Ion Matei COSTINESCU
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
costines@gmail.com

Abstract

On Modernity and Technologies of Nation-Building in the Projects of the Bucharest Sociological School

This article tackles the responses to the crises of modernity and technologies of nation building through the focalizing lens afforded by the Romanian sociologist Dimitrie Gusti (1880-1956) and the Bucharest Sociological School. Gusti’s “scientific” investigations of Romania’s “true,” organic culture as the basis for directing the country’s subsequent development illuminates broader phenomena during the first half of the 20th century. First, the endeavors of the Bucharest Sociological School were part of the widespread quest for the resources and energies of popular mobilization. Second, the project of bolstering national ideologies with the epistemic apparatus of the social sciences marks a fundamental transition in the frames of references informing nationalist discourses throughout Europe and a shift towards more sociologically savvy strategies of nation-building. The cultural integration of the masses into unified nation-states would be justified by the “universal” truths of science. My analysis employs a transnational perspective focusing on the village as a privileged site of nation-building and social reform. The guiding premise is that notions of delayed economic or political development do not point towards historical exceptionalism. Rather, they are a constitutive feature of the modern condition. I thus deploy Gusti’s intellectual and political project as a means of interrogating a longstanding trope of Western scholarship on Romania: the notion of partial or delayed modernization.

Keywords: Bucharest Sociological School; modernity; interwar Eastern Europe; nation-building; epistemic regimes.

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Note bibliografice

  1. [1] The mutually constitutive relationship between nationalism and the social sciences is well documented in the existing literature. See Herman Lebovics, True France: The Wars over Cultural Identity, 1900-1945 (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press 1992); Woodruff Smith, Politics and the Sciences of Culture in Germany, 1840-1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
  2. [1] Romania is often incorporated into a broader trope of Balkan exceptionalism informed by modernization
  3. theory. See Ivan Berendt, Decades of Crisis: Central and Eastern Europe Before World War II (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998).
  4. [1] See Daniel Chirot. “Introduction” in ed. Daniel Chirot. The Origins of Backwardness in Eastern Europe (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 6-10.
  5. [1] See Max Weber. Landsarbeiter Frage, Nationalstaat und Wirtschaftspolitik: Schriften und Reden, 1892-1899, ed. Wolfgang Mommsen and Rita Aldenhoff (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck] 1993); Virgil Madgearu. “Capitalismul în Răsăritul Europei.” Arhiva pentru Ştiința şi Reforma Socială. Vol. VI, no. 3-4 (1927), 265-281. See also Henri H. Stahl. Traditional Romanian village communities. The transition from the communal to the capitalist mode of production in the Danube region (Cambridge & London: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
  6. [1] Reinhard Bendix. Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1962), 20.
  7. [1] The Kulturwissenschaften supplemented the more traditional sciences of the nation, such as political history, ethnology, linguistics, anthropology, philosophy, and economics.
  8. [1] Smith, 3-4.
  9. [1] Catherine Silver. “The Monographic Method” in Frederic Le Play: On Family, Work, and Social Change. Ed. Catherine Silver (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 50.
  10. [1] Irina Livezeanu, Cultural Politics in Greater Romania (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1995), 9-14.
  11. [1] Eugene Weber. Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976).
  12. [1] Dimitrie Gusti. Opere, vol. III (Bucharest: Academia RSR, 1970), 195. All translations from Romanian are mine.
  13. [1] Gusti, Opere, vol. III, 195-6.
  14. [1] Keith Hitchins. “Gȃndirea: Nationalism in a Spiritual Guise” in Ed. Kenneth Jovitt. Social Change in Romania, 1860-1940: A Debate on Development in a European Nation (Berkeley, 1978), 140-73.
  15. [1] Irina Livezeanu. “Generational Politics and the Philosophy of Culture: Lucian Blaga between Tradition and Modernism.” Austrian History Yearbook (2003), no. 33, 207-37.
  16. [1] Maria Bucur. Eugenics and Modernization in Interwar Romania (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2003), 10-11.
  17. [1] Dimitrie Gusti. Cunoaştere şi acţiune în serviciul naţiunii, vol. I (Bucureşti: Fundaţia Culturală Regală „Principele Carol”, 1938), 97-114.
  18. [1]Recensământul general al populaţiei Romăniei din 29 Decemvrie 1930: Neam, limbă maternă, religie (Vol. 2.). Bucureşti: Institutul Central de Statistică, 1938.
  19. [1] See Etienne Balibar & Immanuel Wallerstein. Race, Nation, and Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1991), 97-101.
  20. [1] Bucur, 42.
  21. [1] Gusti. Opere, vol. IV, 32-34.
  22. [1] Dimitrie Gusti. Considerations on the Social Service Law in Romania (Morningside Heights, 1939), 13.
  23. [1] Gusti, Considerations on the Social Service Law…, 18.
  24. [1] See Ernst Gellner. Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, 1983).
  25. [1] Al. Nasta. “Satul Model.” Arhiva pentru Ştiinta şi Reforma Socială. Vol. VII, no.1-2 (1927), 63.
  26. [1] Gusti. Opere, vol. III, 86-92.
  27. [1] Dumitru Amzăr. Un Muzeu Social: De la Le Play si Hazelius la Dimitrie Gusti (Bucureşti: Tiparul Universitar, 1937), 12.
  28. [1] Amzăr. Un Muzeu Social…, 8.
  29. [1] Gusti. Opere, vol. III, 86.
  30. [1] Gusti. Opere, vol. III, 86.
  31. [1] Zoltán Rostás. Strada Latină nr. 8. Monografişti şi echipieri gustieni la Fundaţia Culturală Regală „Principele Carol.” (București: Ed. Curtea Veche, 2009), pp. 52-53.
  32. [1] Gusti. Opere, vol. III, 90.
  33. [1] Gusti. Opere, vol. III, 91.

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