DOI: 10.14754/CEU.2019.03 ACCOUNTING FOR THE “SOCIAL” IN STATE SOCIALIST ROMANIA, 1960s–1980s: CONTEXTS AND GENEALOGIES Adela Hîncu A DISSERTATION in History Presented to the Faculties of the Central European University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Budapest, Hungary 2019 CEU eTD Collection Supervisor of Dissertation Balázs Trencsényi DOI: 10.14754/CEU.2019.03 Copyright in the text of this dissertation rests with the Author. Copies by any process, either in full or in part, may be made only in accordance with the instructions given by the Author and lodged in the Central European University Library. Details may be obtained from the librarian. This page must form a part of any such copies made. Further copies made in accordance with such instructions may not be made without the written permission of the Author. I hereby declare that this dissertation contains no materials accepted for any other degrees in any other institutions and no materials previously written and/or published by another person unless otherwise noted. CEU eTD Collection DOI: 10.14754/CEU.2019.03 Abstract 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 CEU eTD Collection 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 iii DOI: 10.14754/CEU.2019.03 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. First, the reverse genealogical method allows to map a fuller range of strands of intellectual thought than has been made possible by the strong anti-communist turn of the 1990s. Most notably among them is the critical Marxist revisionist thought on the socialist system developed into the late 1980s, which drew on insight from mass culture and mass communications research. Second, the method of reverse genealogy recovers for the history of intellectual thought strands which have been not just abruptly abandoned, but also forgotten to the point of no longer being recognized as intellectual thought in the postsocialist period to begin with. Such is the 1970s literature on women’s emancipation, which focused on issues of economic inequality, double burden, and sexism. Finally, the method of reverse genealogy showcases unacknowledged continuities in terms of scientific practice and ideas about the social between the state socialist and postsocialist periods. The case of quality of life research shows how technical instruments repurposed in the 1990s as tools of transition were originally adapted from Western empirical research for an ambiguous agenda that sought both to “de-politicize” the issue of welfare and to offer tools for managing CEU eTD Collection people’s subjective experience of quality of life. iv DOI: 10.14754/CEU.2019.03 Table of contents Introduction .................................................................................................................... 7 1. Towards a history of the “social” in state socialism ........................................... 7 2. Social sciences in the Eastern bloc and the case of Romania ........................... 14 3. The “reverse genealogy” of postsocialist social thought; on method ............... 25 4. An intellectual genealogy of the project, with acknowledgements .................. 32 PART I: CONTEXTS Chapter 1. The challenge of “the social” ..................................................................... 40 1. Marxist-Leninist social sciences after 1956 ...................................................... 43 2. What is to be debated ........................................................................................ 51 3. Socialist consciousness ..................................................................................... 65 4. Dividing lines .................................................................................................... 76 5. The revision of Marxism-Leninism .................................................................. 86 6. Individual and society ..................................................................................... 100 7. Conclusions ..................................................................................................... 107 Chapter 2. Social theory and “everyday Marxism-Leninism” ................................... 112 1. A path not taken .............................................................................................. 115 2. The institutional setup ..................................................................................... 132 3. The epistemic setup......................................................................................... 140 4. A “common front” in Marxist-Leninist sociology .......................................... 154 5. The “qualitative” turn ..................................................................................... 168 6. Conclusions ..................................................................................................... 178 Chapter 3. Forming the “new sociologist” ................................................................. 182 1. Perspectives on the “re-institutionalization” of sociology .............................. 183 CEU eTD Collection 2. Urban growth processes 1966–1970 “They were forming alongside us” ....... 197 3. Scientific management 1970–1976 “I had more of an inclination towards measuring than the philosophy of measuring” ....................................................... 218 4. Conclusions 1977–1989 “A thing so inelegant it still haunts me today” ....... 236 v DOI: 10.14754/CEU.2019.03 PART I: GENEALOGIES Chapter 4. On participation: Studies about socialist mass culture ............................. 245 1. Cultural activism ............................................................................................. 246 2. The system of mass culture ............................................................................. 257 3. Beyond the systemic approach? ...................................................................... 268 4. Conclusions ..................................................................................................... 285 Chapter 5. On Equality: Studies about women’s emancipation ................................ 287 1. Biological, economic, and social reproduction decoupled ............................. 289 2. The family, theories of rural transformation, and feminist