Traian Herseni
Traian Herseni was a Romanian social scientist, journalist, and political figure. First noted as a favorite disciple of Dimitrie Gusti, he helped establish the Romanian school of rural sociology in the 1920s and early 1930s, and took part in interdisciplinary study groups and field trips. A prolific essayist and researcher, he studied isolated human groups across the country, trying to define relations between sociology, ethnography, and cultural anthropology, with an underlying interest in sociological epistemology. He was particularly interested in the peasant cultures and pastoral society of the Făgăraș Mountains. Competing with Anton Golopenția for the role of Gusti's leading disciple, Herseni emerged as the winner in 1937; from 1932, he also held a teaching position at the University of Bucharest.
Herseni became a committed eugenicist and racial scientist, who discarded a moderate left-wing stance to embrace fascism, and parted ways with Gusti over his support for the Iron Guard. He was nevertheless protected during the anti-Guard backlash of 1938, when Gusti made him a clerk within the Social Service, part of the National Renaissance Front apparatus. A leading functionary and ideologue of the fascist National Legionary State, and a figure of cultural and political importance under dictator Ion Antonescu, he proposed the compulsory sterilization of "inferior races", and wrote praises of Nazi racial policy. Indicted by the communist regime in 1951, he spent four years in prison. He made a slow return to favors as a researcher for the Romanian Academy, participating in the resumption of sociological research, as well as experimenting in social psychology and pioneering industrial sociology.
Formally a partisan of Marxism-Leninism after 1956, Herseni was more genuinely committed to national communism. The national communist policies instituted during the late 1960s allowed him to revisit some of his controversial theses about the ancestral roots of Romanian culture. At various intervals, the regime appropriated his radical ideas on ethnicity, including some criticized as racist. Herseni's final works dealt with ethnology, national psychology, the sociology of literature, and sociological theory in general. In the 1970s, he also produced a body of works interpreting Romanian folklore, in which he emphasized the connections with Indo-European and Paleo-Balkan mythology.
Biography
Origins and schooling
Herseni was a native of Transylvania, which, for most of his childhood, was an Austro-Hungarian province. His home village was Iași, in what was then Brassó County, where his father worked as a notary public. On his paternal side, Herseni originated from nearby Hârseni, which apparently gave the family its name; several families of that name exist throughout the area, suggesting that the anthroponym precedes the geographical location—one theory, advanced by historian Augustin Bunea, is that all Hersenis originate with an Istro-Romanian clan, itself dubbed "Hersenicus". By the time of his death, the sociologist was recorded as a member of the Roman Catholic community. Born on February 18, 1907, Herseni went to school in Iași and Făgăraș, graduating in 1924 from the Radu Negru High School. These years coincided with World War I and the recognition of Transylvania's union with Romania: Herseni began his secondary education in a Hungarian-speaking regimen, and passed his baccalaureate examination in 1924, as a Romanian national. At the time, he was president of the students' literary club, named in honor of poet George Coșbuc.From 1924, Herseni was a student at the University of Bucharest Faculty of Law, studying under Gusti, Constantin Rădulescu-Motru, Nicolae Iorga, Ovid Densusianu, and Vasile Pârvan. Passionate about Gusti's attempts to restructure Romanian social science around rural sociology and participant observation, Herseni was taken on board for Gusti's field trips to Nereju and Fundu Moldovei. Another one of Gusti's students, Henri H. Stahl, first met and befriended him at Nereju, and was impressed by the encounter. Herseni, he writes, "appeared quiet, withdrawn; and yet not lonesome", "ready to take on whoever would oppose him, whether friend or rival". He grasped complex social issues with "rapidity", and "imposed himself as one of the team leaders, obtaining for himself a rank that he would never lose". Herseni was particularly involved in a project to collect data on "pastoral sociology", while Stanciu Stoian observed village schools and Xenia Costa-Foru pioneered studies in the sociology of the family.
Herseni passed his final examination in 1928, having specialized in sociology, psychology, and pedagogy, and presenting a paper on social relations as observed in Fundu Moldovei. This qualified him to teach sociology at the Gheorghe Lazăr National College, where he worked for the following school year. In 1929, he went to Germany for more specialization. He enlisted at the Frederick William University, where he heard lectures by Werner Sombart, Eduard Spranger, Richard Thurnwald, and Alfred Vierkandt. He published an overview of German sociology in Gusti's Arhiva pentru Știință și Reformă Socială, praising it as a "lively and freely-moving science", and as a good model for sociology in "the less advanced countries".
Herseni returned to Bucharest in 1930, did his obligatory service in the Romanian Land Forces, then took part in expeditions, organized by Gusti's Romanian Social Institute, to Drăguș, Runcu, and Cornova. Drăguș, a center of the ethnographic region known as Țara Oltului, was selected on his insistence, being located in close proximity to his native village. At Cornova, Herseni focused on the social hierarchies and segregated clans of a Bessarabian community. He spent some time researching on his own at a sheepcote in the Făgăraș Mountains, publishing his results in Boabe de grâu review. He also began contributing to the Cluj magazine Societatea de Mâine, with articles that inventoried and examined the various kinds of social distance.
As Gusti's aide
In 1932, Herseni married a university and ISR colleague, Paula Gusty. She was the daughter of Paul Gusty, a famous theater director. Also that year, having lectured for a while at Sabin Manuilă's School of Social Work, Herseni was appointed by Gusti's an assistant professor in the University of Bucharest department of sociology, ethics and politics. Stahl claims to have been Gusti's first choice, but to have declined the position in order to suit Herseni, who, as a married man, needed a steady flow of income. As a result, Herseni was slightly better off financially than other intellectuals of his generation.Herseni also followed Stahl's political options: he sympathized with the left-wing cell within the National Peasants' Party, and, in 1933, contributed to center-left reviews such as Zaharia Stancu's Azi and Stahl's own Stânga. He declared himself a partisan of "social democracy" and class collaboration, "not a Marxist, and not a communist, but nevertheless a man of the left". An article he published in Gând Românesc in early 1933 shows him as a deist and Christian existentialist, who argued that the Übermensch where those Christians who could attain a state of grace. The rest of the populace, Herseni argued, "are forever non-human." Emil Cioran, a philosopher of that generation, described Herseni as "passionate" about "Heidegger's existential philosophy", with a "metaphysical sensibility" that was the mark of "true Transylvanian intellectuals, as if to compensate for the petty bourgeois spirit of middle-of-the-road intellectuals".
In 1933, shortly after the Nazi seizure of power, Herseni visited Berlin, befriending there the anti-Nazi Romanian Petre Pandrea. He took his Ph.D. in 1934, with the dissertation paper Realitatea socială, an "essay in regional ontology". It earned praise from Gusti, who called Herseni "one of the most gifted and educated of today's generation", one promising to "enrich Romanian sociology and philosophy with very valuable works." Stahl recalls that only Herseni could match his teacher's "surprisingly vast erudition" and "systematization" of received knowledge; he was also among the more loyal of Gusti's gifted disciples, effectively replacing Petre Andrei, who had spoken out against the ISR. Herseni was an enthusiastic promoter of sociological campaigns, famous as the ISR's "polygraph" and as Gusti's most orthodox interpreter.
According to Stahl, Herseni intended to both popularize sociology and give it "philosophical depth", treating the two tasks as equally important. Taking a neo-Kantian approach to science, Herseni believed that a sound phenomenological inquiry needed to clarify the position and limits of social constructionism, or, as Stahl puts it, to find out "whether there is a 'social' reality, as distinct from 'natural' and 'spiritual' realities." Moreover, Herseni explored the challenges of sociological epistemology and the methodology of participant observation. He believed that objectivity could only be attained with self-imposed limitations and a laborious, preferably collective and interdisciplinary, research program. Herseni declared in 1934 that he followed Ernst Kantorowicz, who had defined sociology as, above all, an experimental science. Also that year, he spoke out in support of Cioran and Constantin Noica's subjectivism, positing that philosophy needed to be understood as inherently separate from science.
Largely "empirical", Herseni and Stahl's sociology nevertheless took its distance from the "transcendentalist" approach of social scientists such as Mircea Vulcănescu, with whom they first clashed in Fundu Moldovei. By 1938, their highly localized qualitative approach was conceding ground to a quantitative "zonal" tactic, which was favored by Gusti and Anton Golopenția. Herseni adopted a tactic of publishing his work in stages, from raw studies in Societatea de Mâine to monographic series, and finally to synthetic volumes and brochures. One such work was printed at Gusti's expense, as Monografia sociologică; rostul, metoda și problemele ei, then reissued in 1934 as Teoria monografiei sociologice, to be used as a standard ISR manual. Gusti also backed Herseni's candidature as chair of the University of Cluj sociology department, vacated after Virgil Bărbat's death. The project failed when local academics elected one of their own, Constantin Sudețeanu, and prompted a much-publicized scandal.