CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2019
| Author | Hincu, Adela-Gabriela |
|---|---|
| Title | Accounting for the "Social" in State Socialist Romania, 1960s-1980s: Contexts and Genealogies |
| Summary | This dissertation reconstructs the contexts and genealogies of scientific thought on the “social” in state socialist Romania in the 1960s–1980s. New ideas and practices of observing, analyzing, and intervening in the social realities of socialist society emerged beginning in the early 1960s, originally in debates over the canonical disciplines of Marxist-Leninist social science (historical materialism, scientific socialism, and Marxist sociology). These were further developed by Marxist revisionist and humanist Marxist thought on the relationship between individuals and society in socialism, which decentered the collectivist ethos characteristic of “dogmatic” Marxism-Leninist philosophy for most of the 1950s. Made possible by the Marxist humanist breakthrough of the early 1960s, Marxist-Leninist sociology was subsequently established as a separate discipline at the Academy of Social and Political Sciences and at the University of Bucharest. Institutional and intellectual constraints and possibilities were differently configured in these two contexts. For the case of the Academy of Social and Political Sciences, the dissertation emphasizes the dynamic between local, transnational, and global frameworks of knowledge production, and the role of Eastern bloc cooperation in the field of sociology in particular. In the Romanian context, the interplay between local and transnational frames of reference resulted in studies of the social structure of socialist society that sought to rework concepts of everyday Marxism-Leninism—as formulated in party pronouncements and translated into the planning of knowledge production in the social sciences. The most notable among these was the concept of “social homogenization.” Developed since the second half of the 1960s, through to the qualitative turn of the late 1970s, and into the 1980s, its history illustrates the interplay between legitimization and criticism characteristic of Marxist-Leninist sociology. Several student cohorts were trained at the University of Bucharest between 1965, when the sociology department was first established, through to 1977, when the department was disbanded, and in a very restricted sense until the end of the 1980s. As taught at the university, sociology drew on Marxist, interwar, and Western sociological sources. This idiosyncratic intellectual blend underpinned large-scale empirical research on the two main sociological issues of social development (especially in relation to industrialization and urbanization) and scientific management (in relation to social planning). By outlining the context of sociology as practiced at the university alongside oral history accounts by sociology students trained at the time, generational, intellectual, and existential fault lines come to the fore beneath a commonly shared understanding of sociology as an apolitical science of “social engineering” with roots in the interwar period. The second part of the dissertation proposes a “reverse genealogy” of three themes which became part of the imaginary of postsocialist intellectual thought on the social: participation, equality, and welfare. It explores how the three intellectual, institutional, and generational contexts identified in the first part of the dissertation played out in sociological research on mass culture, women’s emancipation, and the quality of life in the 1960s–80s. |
| Supervisor | Trencsényi, Balázs |
| Department | History PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2019/hincu_adela-gabriela.pdf |
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