Political Sociology

Project name: Dmitrie Gusti, Romanian Sociologist

Professor: Vahit Guntay

Student: Elena Pascari

I have thought a lot in order to choose an interesting socicologist, and I had decided to make
an research about Dmitrie Gusti. He is a very important sociologist for Romania because he
had developed the sociology for Romanian.

Firstly, I would like to speak about his biography.

Dmitrie Gusti was born in Iasi, a city in Romania. He followed primary school and high
school in Iasi. Between 1898 and 1899 he attended the University of Iasi, at the Faculty of
Letters, Law and Science.

In 1899 he moved to the "Friedrich Wilhelm" University in Berlin and from 1900 to Leipzig,
where he had proffessors such as Wilhelm Wundt, Paul Barth and Karl Bücher. He had made
his disertation with title Egoismus und Altruismus.

In 1908, interested in various disciplines, he returned to Berlin, where he studied sociology

with Georg Simmel, Ferdinand Tönnies, Leopold von Wiese and Max Weber, philosophy
with Friedrich Paulsen and case law with Franz von Liszt and Rudolf Stammler. In 1908 he
went to the sociologist Émi Durkheim in Paris and was also interested in English authors,
such as Herbert Spencer.

In 1910 he became a professor at the University of Iasi, where he taught ethics and sociology
at the Department of History of Greek philosophy, Ethics and Sociology of the Faculty of
Letters and philosophy. In 1918, in the middle of the war, the Association for study and Social
Reform (later, the Romanian Social Institute) was founded in the capital of Moldova, with a
subsequent review. In 1937 it became a body of the International Federation of societies and
sociology institutes. At the end of World War I, he is elected Member of the Romanian
Academy and his reception speech looks at the being and the purpose of academiesIn 1920 he
was transferred to the University of Bucharest, to the Department of Sociology, Ethics and
Ethetics of the Faculty of Letters.

He founded and headed the Association for Science and Social Reform (1919 - 1921), the
Romanian Social Institute (1921 - 1939, 1944 - 1948), the Institute of Social Sciences of
Romania (1939 - 1944), the national Council for Scientific Research (1947 - 1948). He
contributed a lot to introduce sociology in Romanian society. Every Romanian is proud of
him, because he was an international sociologist and influenced Romanian education in a
good way (founded schools and universities).

Since 1925, sociological research on the field (with the village of Găsăea in Dolj County) has
started with multidisciplinary teams of students. Moreover, as Minister of public training, he
creates sociological education in secondary and normal schools. It also founded village
schools and cultural homes. Since 1934 there have been numerous conferences abroad on the
Romanian sociological program: The monographic action in Romania, the sociology of social
units, the Law on social service in Romania. In 1936, he set up the village Museum in
Bucharest, an institution that will develop prestigious until today. After one year he organizes
the Romanian pavilion at the International Exhibition in Paris, and in 1939 he does the same
thing in New York.

After the Red Army invasion and occupation of Romania (on 23 August 1944), the Romanian
Communist Party tried in vain to win Gusti on his side, with offers for collaboration.
However, Dimitrie Gusti became a Member of ARLUS and was invited to the Soviet Union
to attend official ceremonies.

Gusti was a Member of a Masonic lodge in Iasi

So, he was born in Iasi, and we saw that his contribution was focused on developing
education system in Iasi and Bucharest. He made research in Romania, he founded faculties
and school, all these thinks speak about his desire to make a change in Romanian educational
system. He was the first who begun to thought students sociology, to show them why
sociology is important and why we need to know it. He didn’t collaborate with URSS because
he loved his country and his people. As a result he was declared the enemy of the people, a
spy in the service of American imperialism. The systematic beheading of the Romanian elite
in the post-war years remains a phenomenon that we continue to experience painful today. All
of us knows that communist system tried to wash society of intelectuals in order to influence
people easily.

Some Dmitrie Gustie’s sociological ideas :

• Society is made up of social units, that is, groups of people linked together by active
organization and emotional interdependence.

• The essence of society is social will.

• Social will deposits as manifestations of life: an economic and spiritual activity

regulated by a legal activity and a political activity.

• Social will is conditioned in its manifestations by a number of factors or frameworks

which can be reduced to four fundamental categories: cosmic, biological, psychic and
historical.

• Changes to society over time, through its activities and under the influence of
conditionality factors, are called social processes.

• The beginnings of development that we can capture in the present reality and therefore
forecast them with some precision are called social trends.

I Observed that he was influenced from sociologist like Max Weber, Spencer, Durkheim. It is
a result of his universities links.
Some of his books based on sociology. (Most of them are studied in Romanian
universities

The Science of Social Reality, 1941.

Sociology issue, 1940

*Militans sociology (volume I,

1935; volumes I and II, 1946)

I would like to present briefly one of his books, “Encyclopedia of Romania”. I had chosen this
book, because it is so important work for Romania.
The Encyclopedia of Romania is a national encyclopedia, four of the six volumes of which
were published between 1938 and 1943. Dmitrie Gusti thought of the Encyclopedia of
Romania structured on three large chapters divided into six programmed volumes.

This is my project, I have tried to present important facts about this important personality. I
think you could read something new for you and all information is clear. Thank you for
attention.