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No. 2(13) (2017): Sociology under State Socialism

Sociology versus Ideology in Communist Romania: Sociology’s Re-Emergence and Role

  • Stefan Bosomitu
Submitted
22 May 2020
Published
01-11-2017

Abstract

The post-war history of Romanian sociology followed a tortuous path, similar to the evolutions within other countries of the Soviet Bloc. Defined as a “bourgeois” and “reactionary” social science, sociology was purged from the academic field for almost two decades. Its subsequent re-institutionalisation in the mid-1960s was a process largely influenced by social evolution in Romania (industrialisation, urbanisation, and the collectivisation of agriculture), but also by the desire to re-connect the Romanian social sciences to the international field of dialogue and debates. My paper discusses not only the institutional articulation and development of sociology in communist Romania, but also how the discipline was re-imagined and re-contextualised by the regime.

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