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