Social science and Marxist humanism beyond collectivism in Socialist Romania

Social scientists’ debates in early 1960s Socialist Romania were riddled with epistemic anxieties. Over the previous decade, Marxism-Leninism had become the philosophical basis for all knowledge production in the state socialist countries of East Central Europe, a process that involved strategies with varying degrees of success (Connelly, 2000). Similarly, de-Stalinization inspired by Khrushchev's criticism of the cult of personality after the death of Stalin was taken up by social scientists very differently across East Central Europe: from the 1956 Revolution in Hungary and the challenge it posed to Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy, including in terms of its later interpretation (Birkás, 2018); to de-Stalinization attempts from within the party being promptly halted in Romania, followed by a wave of censorship and repression among social scientists around 1958; to resisting de-Stalinization altogether in the GDR (see Tismăneanu [2009] for national case studies; and Trencsényi et al. [2018: Chapter 9]). Toward the beginning of the 1960s, as ‘revisionist’ approaches to Marxism gained momentum, social scientists from the Soviet Union and East Central Europe began discussing again the merits of various supposedly ‘pseudo-bourgeois’ disciplines, most notably sociology (Voříšek, 2007).

Some of the epistemic anxieties of social scientists under state socialism were duly captured in histories of the social sciences ‘in transformation’ following the regime changes across the region (e.g. Keen and Mucha, 1994). These stemmed from the perceived threat of political admonition, censorship, or institutional restructuring, tied to the instability of Marxist-Leninist ‘orthodoxy’ as a system of thought and to the repressive capacities of the party-state. Other anxieties were related to technical aspects of empirical research; with an eye on the developments of empirical methods in the West, social scientists decried their own lack of expertise and computational infrastructure. Finally, there were voices who expressed concerns about the changing political mission and especially the fading ‘humanity’ of the social sciences as they became more invested in the quantification of social phenomena. This latter concern has often been misread by local historiographies as a routinized, ideological criticism of Western social science. Yet as I maintain in this article, this was not specific to socialism, but to the development of social science disciplines competing over epistemic authority in the public space, and to the waning of the social in social thought more broadly in the context of the Cold War. The case of social thought under state socialism, including the Romanian one in this article, illustrates this process as well as a robust tradition on the left of debating the relationship between society and individuals in the postwar period.

This article is in dialogue with two main fields of historiography. First, it is a contribution to the growing field of Cold War social science (Daye, 2014). Focused mostly on capitalist societies, this scholarship has pointed to the connection between scientific positivism and the conservative turn in American postwar social science (Cravens, 2012). It has also shown the growing shift in American politics, policy making, and the public social imagination during the Cold War from a socio-structural to an individualized understanding of social issues. This was reflected in and underlined by growing differences among social science disciplines in their ability to speak effectively on the topic of social issues, and most notably to the growing influence of economics and psychology at the expense of sociology (Fontaine and Pooley, 2020). Furthermore, Dorothy Ross has argued that historiography has dated the weakening of the social liberal project in the US to the 1970s in part because of the overrepresentation of economics in the literature on the rise of neoliberalism. Focusing on social thought, Ross has instead traced the ‘thinning’ of the social to the 1950s, arguing that it was both occasioned by and has fueled thinking about totalitarianism in the social sciences (Ross, 2021). By asking how Cold War social science developed under state socialism, this paper draws attention to parallels, and more importantly entanglements between capitalist and socialist social thought in the postwar period.

Second, the article engages with the historiography of social and political thought under state socialism. So far, this scholarship has privileged the study of dissident, liberal, and civil society discourses (for a comprehensive overview, see Trencsényi et al., 2018). Beyond the interest in revisionist Marxist traditions of political thought in the region as challenges to state socialism from within (Taras, 1992), Marxist social thought in East Central Europe has only received marginal attention compared to interwar political thought in the region. At the same time, scholarship on the history of social sciences and social thought under state socialism currently consists of a diversity of national case studies of different disciplines. As several collective publications have pointed out, this has partly been the consequence of pressing local discipline-building projects in the post-socialist period and is partly an illustration of epistemic inequalities dating back to the Cold War (Boldyrev and Kirtchik, 2016; Brunnbauer, Kraft, and Schulze Wessel, 2011; Duller and Pawlak, 2017; Hîncu, 2018). State socialist case studies have rarely been included in comparative studies of postwar social sciences (e.g. Hungary in Fleck, Duller, and Karady, 2019). Reflection on the intertwined history of knowledge in the social sciences East and West has been articulated especially in studies of economic thought that have either investigated the co-production of neoliberalism or the history of collectivist economic ideas (Bockman, 2011; Gagyi, 2015; Kovács, 2018); as well as in scholarship that has taken a transnational perspective to knowledge production (Iacob et al., 2018; Marks and Savelli, 2015).

In this article I bring together the history of the social sciences and the history of social thought, arguing that the main shift in thinking and research about the social in Socialist Romania occurred earlier than the transnational moment of the 1970s. This allows on the one hand to resituate the history of individual disciplines such as sociology within a broader history of specialization, quantification, and epistemic competition in the social sciences; and on the other hand to rethink ideas about collectivism, society, and the individual under state socialism as concurrent and in dialogue with similar concerns about the social in capitalist societies. Focusing on the debates and empirical studies that preceded sociology's reestablishment as an independent discipline in the mid 1960s, I show that reflection about the relationship between individual and society was both occasioned by and the unintended casualty of the drive for specialization and discipline-building in the social sciences. Such reflection was made possible by (a) the reassessment of the Marxist-Leninist canon in social science, which was prompted by the debate over the relationship between Marxist sociology and historical materialism; (b) the argument that social practice, individual and collective agency, and people's subjectivities were not theoretically irrelevant, as previously thought, and their integration, via empirical sociological research, into the reworked conceptual apparatus of Marxism-Leninism; and (c) the separation of sociology from historical materialism. In the last section, I show that the methodology of no one social scientific discipline structured the different approaches to the study of the relationship between individual and society in socialism that flourished in the 1960. Rather, all social sciences converged toward a broad Marxist humanist discourse that did not achieve the institutional status of a distinct discipline.

Beyond collectivism in social science and social thought

In Socialist Romania, the separation of different disciplines in the social sciences and the philosophical reworking by revisionist Marxism of ideas about collectivism, society, and the individual were intertwined. This insight has largely been lost due to two features of post-socialist historiography. In terms of the history of social thought, historiography has focused overwhelmingly on Romania's version of ‘national communism’ (Copilaş, 2015; Iacob, 2011; Verdery, 1991). Moreover, from the perspective of totalitarian theory, the supposed irrelevance of Marxist revisionist thought in Romania compared to its prominence in Hungary, Poland, or Czechoslovakia has been presented as proof of the Romanian regime's exceptional dogmatism, dubbed ‘neo-Stalinism’ (Tismăneanu, 1992, 2003). In what concerns the historiography of the social sciences, the case of sociology is exemplary. On the one hand, accounts of the discipline as it developed in Socialist Romania have focused on its dramatic institutional history: banned after 1945, it was re-institutionalized in the second half of the 1960s, only to be marginalized again in the late 1970s (Bosomitu, 2012; Rostás, 2012). On the other hand, in terms of knowledge production, histories of sociology have emphasized that sociologists engaged with the hegemonic Marxist-Leninist discourse only opportunistically and superficially, preferring, as a strategy of legitimation and survival, to produce an esoteric, almost exclusively technical body of knowledge, rather than participate in theoretical debates (Cotoi, 2011). As accounts of repression and resistance, both these historiographical approaches have obscured the extent to which Marxism-Leninism was, as Michael Voříšek has shown for Poland, the Soviet Union, and Czechoslovakia, ‘an ideology that mattered’ in the development of sociology. Far from being an ‘external intrusion’, Marxism-Leninism was an integral part of the discipline's intellectual design (Voříšek, 2007). Voříšek has analyzed how establishing Marxist sociology required working within the Stalinist orthodoxy on sociology's place among the three main disciplines of Marxism-Leninism (dialectical and historical materialism, political economy, and scientific socialism/communism). Extending his argument, I maintain that in Socialist Romania the debate over the relation between historical materialism, scientific socialism, and Marxist sociology was not merely the device for sociology's emancipation as an autonomous discipline, abandoned as soon as sociology created a solid institutional framework for itself. Instead, it signaled that core tenants of Marxist-Leninist epistemology could now be discussed.

Historical materialism—the core philosophical science under socialism, that mapped the development of society on the basis of successive modes of production—and scientific socialism—the science of the revolutionary struggle of the Communist Party—were institutionalized in Romania after 1948, largely on the basis of the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Stalin's so-called Short Course of 1938), Lenin's writings, and party documents. Students in the department of philosophy at the University of Bucharest in the early 1950s recall having had neither the time nor the background needed to understand the writings of Marx and Engels, which they were assigned as optional readings deemed ‘too intellectual’ (Flonta, 2016). Yet, in the second half of the 1950s, like elsewhere in the Eastern bloc, revisionist Marxist approaches, drawing on the local prewar traditions of Marxist thought and activism and on the writings of Marx and Engels, began disputing dogmatic historical materialism. Various authors criticized it on the grounds of its determinism and inability to account for contradictions in the theory of historical development, especially as evinced by contemporary social realities. This criticism extended to scientific socialism in particular, which concerned itself almost exclusively with party documents and therefore was widely taken to be a domain of party activists. Scientific socialism was taken to task for failing to provide a coherent theory of the role of revolutionary practice in building socialism. The two most important consequences of these calls for intellectual renewal were the conceptualizations of the relationships among ideology, social practice, and social reality, and of the role of collective and individual agency under socialism.

The shift in conceptualizations of the social becomes clear when one compares the criticism of subjectivism in the early 1950s, the understanding of the collective and the individual right before the Marxist revisionist debate began in the early 1960s, and the formulation of the relationship between society and individual in the early 1970s, ten years after the debate had run its course. These conceptualizations were grounded in the changing institutional, intellectual, and generational contexts of social science disciplines, especially Marxist-Leninist philosophy and sociology. Whether they were articulated at moments of institutional uncertainty, when disciplines were in the process of reorganization, or when the actors felt secure in their institutional standing made a difference to their performative role—as concepts meant not just to describe but to enact different realities. Similarly, it is important to understand conceptualizations within their broader intellectual landscape, whether defined by the drive to criticize bourgeois ideology, by the investment in revisionist Marxism, or by a conservative turn toward national communism.

Finally, the individual trajectories and generational belonging of the actors involved in the debates is essential to understanding their positioning. For the philosophers trained either before the Second World War or immediately after, the experience of (illegal) communist and antifascist organizing, anti-Semitic repression and the Holocaust, postwar reconstruction, and Stalinization had been crucial to their approach to Marxism-Leninism as closely intertwined with dramatic historical upheavals. This generation was also involved in establishing the main philosophy institutions in the 1950s, most notably the Academy's Institute of Philosophy, whose first director was Constantin Ionescu Gulian (Vasile, 2018), and the departments of philosophy at universities and other training institutions throughout the country (Maci, 2018), with Tudor Bugnariu leading those in Cluj and later Bucharest (Bosomitu, 2014). For the interwar intellectuals who had not espoused communist or Marxist beliefs, and who had been central to the development of sociology as a discipline, their postwar trajectories ranged from imprisonment and death to marginalization to partial reintegration (Rostás, 2021). The relationship between the discipline's past and its re-institutionalization in the 1960s was very fraught, even if some of the interwar sociologists were mentors for the new generations of social scientists (Bosomitu, 2017).

For the generation trained in the 1950s and early 1960s, professional integration and the experience of relative autonomy within securely established institutions meant that criticism could be articulated from within the existing structures, in the logic of ‘creative’ Marxism-Leninism. This is also the generation that first benefited from the experience of academic mobility abroad in the 1960s and 1970s, as in the case of Mihail Cernea or Cătălin Zamfir, who were originally trained as philosophers but could specialize in sociology in the US through the newly established IREX exchange program (Hîncu, 2020). The existential and intellectual stakes were markedly different for the generation of social scientists trained in specializations established beginning in the second half of the 1960s, such as sociology or political science, which proved institutionally fragile and intellectually stifled especially from the end of the 1970s onward (Hîncu, 2019).

In the early 1950s, subjectivism and objectivism were levelled as criticism against bourgeois philosophy within a binary logic that opposed it to Marxist-Leninist philosophy. Writing in 1953, as a young philosophy graduate, for the edification of workers in the field of propaganda, Alexandru Tănase, who became a prominent philosopher of culture in the 1960s and the head of the Institute of Philosophy in the 1970s, described the role of subjectivism in bourgeois natural sciences and in particular in social science. The latter entailed ‘maintaining that in history facts and events happen not because of objective and necessary causes, but because of the intentions, wishes, and will of different personalities’ (Tănase, 1953: 114). In contrast, Tănase showed that Marxism maintained the determining role of objective laws of development and social conditions, and not that of any one strong personality. Instead, it recognized the agency and creative role of the masses, defining their subjectivity as the reflection of objective processes in their minds—their ‘socialist consciousness’. Misjudgment of either the objective social conditions or of people's subjectivity, concluded Tănase, had led to excesses in the construction of socialism, for example with the forced collectivization of agriculture. This formulation of the issues of subjectivity and individual and collective agency suggests that the theory of ‘capitalist subjectivism’ played a similar role in social thought under state socialism to the theory of totalitarianism in the West. It originally oriented thinking about the social in terms of opposition between two worldviews, emphasizing the role of collective agency in history against that of exceptional individuals.

A decade later, in the early 1960s, the issue of the relationship between individuals and the collective was already addressed differently. A typical article on collectivism at that time, by party activist Costel Buzdugan, who became secretary of the main communist youth newspaper Scînteia Tineretului in the early 1970s, began by quoting Marx on the human essence as the sum of social relations; it then recapitulated the historical succession of social arrangements, from primitive communism to capitalism, that organized the social relations created through the processes of production; next, it characterized collectivism in opposition to the bourgeois individualism at the core of capitalism; and then it identified collectivism as the main organizing principle of social relations under socialism and the communism to come. Buzdugan claimed that collectivism, aside from its occasional contradictions, reflected the identity that held between individual and collective interests. The typical imaginary of the article was that of self-regulating workers’ brigades: individual achievement was celebrated, but when it threatened to lead to individualism, it was curbed by the brigade, as the institutor and enforcer of the moral imperative of collectivism (Buzdugan, 1962).

Another decade later, the newest edition of the handbook of historical materialism, compiled in 1972 by the philosophy faculty at the University of Bucharest, included a separate chapter on the relationship between the individual and society. The author of the section, Cătălin Zamfir, was a young philosopher trained in the second half of the 1950s, who continued teaching in the Philosophy Department at the University of Bucharest after graduating in 1962 and become increasingly interested in empirical social research and social theory. He opened the handbook chapter with the same quote from Marx as Buzdugan but argued that even with Marx's breakthrough in understanding the social nature of man, the relationship between individual and society was hard to comprehend. The topic had been central to Marx's early work on alienation. It was also becoming prominent for Marxist humanism, which drew on the early work of Marx to articulate a social theory focused on multiple, interconnected issues: the humanization of different forms of social organization; self-emancipation and control over one's own social life; conscious, participatory action; and the scientific investigation of society (Zamfir, 1972).

As Anna Krylova has argued for the Soviet Union, ‘the post-Bolshevik Soviet discourse on the modern socialist individual’ aimed not to merge but ‘to “connect” (that is, relate) individual predispositions and goals with the social good’ (Krylova, 2014: 171). In Socialist Romania, as well, the relationship between individual and society increasingly became a topic of interest over the 1950s and especially the 1960s. An important part of this process was restructuring the Marxist-Leninist social scientific canon. This involved boundary work for the legitimation of sociology, anthropology, praxeology, and political science, among others, as newly (re-)established disciplines engaged in the construction of the socialist society. Yet the most important challenge to the ‘collectivism’ (i.e. lack of specialization) of the social sciences, subsumed under Marxism-Leninism, came from sociology.

The debate on the place of sociology in the Marxist-Leninist social science canon was a transnational, densely cross-referenced exchange that social scientists conducted across East Central Europe since the end of the 1950s. The discussions proceeded at various rhythms within different national contexts and lasted into the second half of the 1960s (Voříšek, 2012). In Romania, much like in the Soviet Union, discussions were mired in epistemic anxieties, as the perceived threat of being charged with heterodoxy and purged still lingered into the 1960s. Unlike in Poland, where the remaining interwar social scientists were reintegrated to academia by 1956, Romanian social scientists who attempted to recover interwar methodologies of empirical research faced accusations of ‘idealism’ or ‘objectivism’, and were denounced for lack of ideological commitment as late as 1958 (Doboş, 2020). Similarly to Czechoslovakia, the debate over the place of sociology among Marxist-Leninist social sciences in Romania unfolded over a short time span. Though it displayed a variety of contesting opinions, its outcome was inconclusive and theoretical considerations were ultimately abandoned in favor of sociological practice.

The Romanian debate was inaugurated in the journal Cercetări filozofice (Studies in Philosophy) in 1962 by Radu Florian's article ‘On the Object of Historical Materialism and the Marxist-Leninist Sociology’ (Florian, 1962). Florian had survived the June 1941 Jewish pogrom in Iaşi, in which his father and brother lost their lives, and after the war finished his studies in Bucharest and taught Marxism-Leninism, later renamed scientific socialism, in the philosophy department of the University of Bucharest. In his article, he summarized the different views circulated in Soviet and Bulgarian sources on the relation between historical materialism and sociology. Echoing Bulgarian sociologist Zivko Oshavkov, he controversially concluded that Marxist-Leninist sociology was not a philosophical science. It was rather a general sociology distinct from (but not independent of) historical materialism in its content and character. He also argued, more importantly, that its subject matter partly coincided with that of scientific socialism—namely, the struggle of the proletariat to build communism. His general view of sociology had two important implications. First, it identified the domain of sociology as social practice, both individual and collective. Second, it took sociology to be a science that served the party.

The responses to Florian's article were overwhelmingly negative, and participants in the ensuing debate proposed various alternatives to what was understood as his identification of Marxist sociology with scientific socialism. Several authors called for the establishment of political science as a discipline concerned with social relations and, by implication, separate from scientific socialism. The latter would only concern itself with the political activity of the masses (Popovici and Trăsnea, 1962). Others however sought to preserve Marxist sociology's identity with historical materialism and the distinctiveness of scientific socialism from both. For them, the priority was to create more stable institutional arrangements against the unpredictable redistribution of resources and personnel, especially outside of Bucharest. Their arguments also reflected attempts to carve for the profession some relative autonomy from party politics. Two representatives of the second category were philosophers Nicolae Kallós and Andrei Roth, both of Hungarian-Jewish descent and survivors of interwar anti-Semitic violence. As university professors of historical materialism in Cluj, for whom one of the appeals of the 1950s Stalinist discourse at a time of continued ethnic tensions had been its internationalism, Kallós and Roth were invested in navigating the uncertainties of de-Stalinization and budding nationalism at the beginning of the 1960s by securing their institutional arrangements at the Babeş-Bolyai University, specifically the standing of historical materialism. They took issue with Florian's claim that historical materialism studied only the general laws of society, and not the way in which they were implemented in contemporary social relations. For Kallós and Roth, historical materialism could incorporate both empirical research and specialized disciplines while remaining a unified general sociology (Kallós and Roth, 1962).

Between all the commentators who contributed to the debate, almost no combination between historical materialism, Marxist sociology, and scientific socialism remained unexplored. Only slightly younger than Roth, the Babeş-Bolyai professor Mihu Achim, who would publish extensively on sociometry and the sociology of small groups only a few years later and write an overview of humanist Marxism at the end of the 1970s, even argued that sociology included historical materialism, rather than the other way around (Achim, 1963).

Overall, these early debates illustrate social scientists’ drive to reconceptualize socialist modernity starting from its epistemic underpinnings. This meant re-establishing the subject of Marxist-Leninist philosophy under socialist society's rapidly changing realities. Disciplinary aspirations were not the sole reason driving the various solutions proposed for the need to mediate between party-state policies and social life. Another motivation was the genuine interest in the potential of post-Stalinist Marxist theory to respond creatively to the challenges raised by these new realities. This common concern explains why, despite the strict lines of demarcation drawn in the Marxist sociology debate, Radu Florian, Mihu Achim, or Andrei Roth would write in the 1970s and 1980s very similar texts on the relationship between the individual and society. Their work signaled the convergence toward a Marxist humanist perspective that brought to the fore the social agency of individuals and groups in the construction of the socialist society. Parallel to these developments in philosophy, social scientists sought to take stock of the social transformations brought about in the 1940s–1950s by the consolidation of the new political regime and the setting-up of the command economy. They also responded to the drive to industrialize and urbanize that gained momentum by the end of the 1950s, by offering to identify, model, and manage the resulting social changes. Sociology emerged beginning in the early 1960s as the science most suited to undertake these tasks, and at the turn of the decade sociologists started pursuing large-scale empirical studies on the social aspects of industrialization.

Empirical research, agency, and the separation of sociology from historical materialism

Rather than a dogmatic, defensive reaction to the progress of empirical science, the insistence with which historical materialism was ultimately identified with Marxist sociology by most social scientists in Romania during the early 1960s can be seen as part of a broader project of post-Stalinist ideological renewal. Much as Marx and Lenin had based their theories on the realities of their time, the argument went, Marxist theory founded on social scientific research was going to help close the growing gap between social reality and party and state policies. In parallel to the debate about the relationship between historical materialism and Marxist sociology, the main subject of interest for Marxist philosophers and social scientists at the beginning of the 1960s was the concept of ‘socialist consciousness’.

From the viewpoint of the early 1960s, consciousness had a suspect history as a concept. Marx and Engels had made only few references to it, but its theoretical use could be traced back to Lenin's work, in particular What Is to Be Done and his distinction between spontaneity and consciousness in the history of the working class. As Anna Krylova has shown, the centrality of this dichotomy for the Bolshevik view of the working class was constructed and reproduced in Soviet studies beginning at the end of the 1940s (Krylova, 2003). Simplifying Lenin's argument, Stalinist Marxism-Leninism identified socialist consciousness chiefly with the vanguard role of the party. However, with Khrushchev's repudiation of Stalin's Short Course, post-Stalinist Marxist thought in East Central Europe found the term ‘socialist consciousness’ largely open to interpretation, even though some aspects of the official doctrine were never challenged (Takács, 2015). The guiding Soviet work on the subject translated into Romanian defined the ‘forms’ of social consciousness (Kelle and Kovalzon, 1961), and subsequent debates revolved around attempts to add to the existing forms. Among the countries of Eastern Europe, the concept of ‘socialist consciousness’ became especially salient in Hungary. After the 1956 Revolution, the Hungarian Communist Party appropriated the term for its official ideology. It became one of the Kádár regime's core ideological concepts throughout the 1960s and 1970s in a bid to ensure the regime's legitimacy by mediating between ideological pronouncements and material realities on the one hand, and on the other hand by accommodating both reformist and orthodox views on the role of individual and collective action under state socialism (Takács, 2015).

In Romania, too, the concept originated with the party pursuing a more reformist line, although it never achieved the centrality it had in Hungary. Research into socialist consciousness, or what were called the ‘subjective factors’ of the transition to communism, was triggered by the Third Congress of the Romanian Workers’ Party, which focused on the tasks of ideological work now that the country had achieved the material basis of socialism. The Philosophy Institute of the Romanian Academy published the first theoretical volume on the development of socialist consciousness in 1961, which concluded that the party was the main subjective factor in this process (Breazu, 1961). The publication hinted at the dialectical relationship between the objective material factors and the subjective ones in the construction of socialism. However, it did not go much beyond laying down the party's new line, namely, that class struggle had moved into the realm of socialist consciousness.

Mihail Cernea, one of the volume's several co-authors, had been trained in philosophy in the 1950s while also working in journalism, and joined the Institute of Philosophy as a researcher in 1959. He recalled that following the publication of the first book on socialist consciousness, ‘we were all aware of what the volume was missing … facts of life, real people. This is where the impulse came from to do something different, something new, with different methods, to move out of the sphere of generalities and examine the surrounding reality.’ ¹ In 1961–2, a group of four researchers from the department of historical materialism at the institute conducted empirical (in the parlance of the time, ‘concrete’) sociological research about the socialist consciousness of the working class in three Bucharest factories. The resulting book, The Spiritual Profile of the Working Class in Socialism (hereafter The Spiritual Profile), published in 1964, covered theoretical, methodological, and conceptual issues. The latter included the workers’ assimilation of Marxist-Leninist ideology, the development of their economic thinking, their consumption of culture, and the contradiction they experienced between old and new moral norms (Cazacu et al., 1964). The book's working theoretical tenet was the Marxist-Leninist ‘theory of reflection’, which held that people's social existence determined their social consciousness, which was, in turn, a spiritual reflection of their social existence. Although this was quite conventional, methodologically, however, the four researchers incorporated extensive documentation into their analysis: official party documents and theoretical literature as well as administrative reports, statistics, economic studies, factory newspapers, and transcripts of production meetings. They also conducted individual interviews, administered questionnaires to their representative sample of 700 subjects selected from a population of 3,500 workers, and used for the manual correlation of data Soviet and American methods from the 1950s. ² Their aim was both to offer practical recommendations for policy and to integrate their conclusions into the theory of historical materialism. They hoped to achieve this by focusing on social practices (productive work, political participation, instruction, and education) and the agency of the working class. The working class, they argued, was not merely ‘a sum of identical individuals’ (see also Cazacu, Cernea, and Chepeş, 1963); it consisted of workers’ different subjectivities.

Historians have seen such increasing interest in issues of human agency as the mark of post-Stalinist Marxist thought in the Soviet Union and East Central Europe. During the 1920s and 1930s, the Marxist-Leninist philosophical canon had stabilized as dialectical materialism and historical materialism. According to Zhivka Valiavicharska, the most far-reaching consequence of establishing the two disciplines was that they managed to ‘skillfully take away political agency from the collective body they were meant to empower, remove human agency from all knowledge production, and establish positivist methodologies of socialist knowledge’ (Valiavicharska, 2011: 45). Post-Stalinist revisions, Valiavicharska argued, challenged dogmatic Marxism-Leninism exactly on its purging of collective agency from history and of the knowing subject from epistemology. In Bulgaria, social scientists and philosophers proposed a ‘third way’ between authoritarian socialism and bourgeois democracy by focusing on the youth as a historical subject whose collective agency would become the driving force for the transformation of real-existing socialism. In Romania, too, questions of individual and collective agency, the possibility of Marxist humanism, and the democratization of socialist governance were intertwined with the revision of the epistemological assumptions of Marxism-Leninism as the scientific study of society. Having established that historical materialism was the Marxist sociology, philosophers and social scientists worked to reformulate its theoretical and methodological assumptions. The example of socialist consciousness illustrates the beginnings of this double agenda for social and epistemological change.

At the core of the understanding of socialist consciousness was the Marxist-Leninist model of base and superstructure, and its economic reductionism. The authors of The Spiritual Profile did not directly challenge either the principle of reflection implied in the model or the preeminence of the material conditions of social existence over the spiritual ones. Their challenge came, rather, from within this accepted theoretical framework, and it consisted in producing a set of theoretical tenets that were neither general nor empirical, but midrange. The dialectic relationship between social existence and social consciousness, they argued, was complicated by the dynamics of consciousness itself. They particularly referred to what they called ‘spontaneous reflection’ (phenomena of social psychology, and particularly people's feelings, mentalities, habits, prejudices, etc.) and ‘elaborate reflection’ (ideology and theory).

The book's chapter on the development of political consciousness, by Honorina Cazacu, is instructive in this regard. As the party secretary at the institute, Cazacu is often remembered as a more dogmatic scholar, yet her trajectory in sociological research in the 1970s and 1980s led her to interesting conclusions about the social structure of Socialist Romania, particularly the reproduction of class inequalities. For The Spiritual Profile, on the basis of individual and aggregated replies to questions regarding the character of industrial work and workers’ life goals, Cazacu described the ‘law-like’ process by which workers’ affective responses to changes in social existence are gradually processed into higher-level generalizations without losing their independent status. Cazacu's deterministic account of the increasing ideologization of social life under socialism notwithstanding, it is clear that her effort was to once again make spontaneous consciousness theoretically relevant. In the longer run, the strategy of positing intermediary stages between social realities and the abstract laws of historical materialism would allow Cazacu to question the explanatory value of the ‘law of reflection’ itself. In this manner, she shifted the focus of research to the functional analysis of social consciousness and its role in the social acquisition of knowledge (as a process of de-alienation), the formation of public opinion, and the creation of spiritual values (Cazacu, 1967).

In his chapter on the economic thinking of the working class, Mihail Cernea stressed the epistemological aspects of the development of socialist consciousness. He concerned himself with the kinds of knowledge about the economic underpinnings of the socialist society that workers required, how they acquired it, and the uses to which they put it. Cernea assumed the same two-level model of ‘spontaneous’ and ‘theoretical consciousness’ as Cazacu did. He argued that in order for workers to reach their full potential as socialist agents, they both had to acquire unsystematic economic knowledge in the course of their participation in production and to develop a new form of economic thinking (which he would later call ‘economic consciousness’). Cernea focused on social practices of collective action, such as production meetings, the collective analysis of production plans, socialist competition, and the work of rationalization commissions. The data that he collected revealed workers’ mass participation in these activities, their interest in acquiring an understanding of the overall workings of production, and the desire of many to discuss deficiencies in the production process. These findings certainly fit the image of the working class as building communism. They allowed Cernea to make the point that, unlike under capitalism, where the distribution, circulation, and management of information were perceived as an organizational problem, in socialism they were a ‘human problem’ to be addressed in terms of ‘subjective factors’. Like Cazacu, Cernea worked within the historical-materialist framework to bring workers’ conscious agency into focus. His second objective was to integrate the ideal of a fully emancipated, economically informed working-class subject into the theoretical understanding of the working class as playing the leading role in the creation of socialism. Cernea spelled out the full implications of his theory of democratic, participatory socialism in the paper that he presented at the Sixth World Congress of Sociology in 1966. There, he argued that economic knowledge and the development of new forms of economic thinking were both the product of and required for workers’ and peasants’ genuine participation in the collective leadership of factories and cooperatives (Cernea, 1967).

The 1964 volume on the spiritual profile of the working class, and Cernea's notion of economic consciousness in particular, generated a sustained debate on the issue of empirical sociology. The discussion signaled the separation of historical materialism and sociology as disciplines and of a priori social thought and empirical sociological research. This separation was institutionalized by the establishment of university departments and research centers for sociology, beginning in 1966, and by the reorganization of academic research after 1970, with the founding of the Academy for Social and Political Sciences. The first reviews of The Spiritual Profile welcomed its empirical sociological research while highlighting three interconnected tensions considered to stem from it. Philosopher Niculae Bellu, one of the representatives of the Marxist generation trained before the Second World War, and professor of ethics at the University of Bucharest, summarized them in the introduction to a roundtable discussion of the volume organized by Revista de filozofie in 1965: first, the tension between deductive and inductive methods, which raised the overarching question of whether theory and empirical sociological research should remain separate. Second, the gap between the empirical data and the theoretical conclusions drawn from them, which Bellu formulated as a criticism of the instrumental, rather than genuinely productive character of empirical research. And third, the tension at the very core of the empirical method, namely, the way in which it conceived the relationship between the researcher and her research subject (Niculae Bellu, in ‘Stenograma’, 1965: 547–9).

The previous consensus about the identity of historical materialism and Marxist sociology was no longer explanatorily adequate. In particular, critics argued that Mihail Cernea's concept of economic consciousness illustrated the incompatibility of deductive and inductive methods in sociological research. As a conceptual innovation that stemmed from his creative combination of the two methods, ‘economic consciousness’ was criticized as both inconsistent with the Marxist theory of the forms of social consciousness and as overstepping the empirical data available (Drăgan, 1964). The authors of The Spiritual Profile were also criticized for having conducted not an empirical sociological study but a work of historical materialism about the forms of social consciousness in socialism that only sparingly employed empirical methods to justify its conclusions. The implication of this remark was that the only ‘scientific’ methodologies were inductive ones (Zigu Ornea, in ‘Stenograma’, 1965: 551–3).

The distinction drawn by Bellu and many others in the second half of the 1960s between deductive and inductive methods, between philosophy and science, and especially between theory and practice would prove to be an enduring feature of Marxist sociology's identity as a discipline over the 1970s. However, as the decade winded down, this also made sociology more vulnerable to marginalization. At the same time, the end of the debate over the difference between historical materialism and Marxist sociology was perceived by social scientists to be to the detriment of the former's attempts to free itself of dogma. At the end of the 1960s, Mihail Cernea maintained that Marxist sociology was a science that had creatively broken away from historical materialism, yet did not sever its ties to philosophy (Cernea, in ‘Manualul’, 1968: 988). In the long run, however, with sociologists’ increasing interest in questions of scientific method rather than Marxist theory, Cernea's view was not sustainable. In 1973, looking back at the studies conducted at the Institute of Philosophy over the previous decade, he conceded that the beginnings of empirical sociological research had been a reaction to the dogmatism of Marxist philosophy. He now argued that these early endeavors had not been ‘consistently sociological’, and that at times they had relied more on ‘deduction rather than facts’. Formulated in these terms, his self-criticism embraced the separation between (rather than the mutual dependence of) philosophy and sociology and portrayed ‘concrete sociological research’ as just an episode in the discipline's development as a science (Cernea, 1973).

The relationship between empirical data and its interpretation came to be articulated as largely a problem specific to the inductive methods of sociological investigation. The latter was supposed to expand both the scale and scope of empirical research—what Mihu Achim termed ‘extensive’ and ‘intensive representativity’, respectively (Achim, in ‘Stenograma’, 1965: 549–51). Commentary on the methodology of empirical research used at the Institute of Philosophy also pointed toward one of the starkest differences between Marxist philosophy and sociology. Henri Wald was trained as a philosopher at the end of the 1930s and was first introduced to Marxism during forced labor, to which part of the Jewish population was subjected during the war. In the debate, Wald contrasted sociology's drive to minimize the role of the knowing subject in researching a particular object with the insistence of historical materialism on the unity of subject and object: ‘general sociology is rigorously de-anthropomorphized, while historical materialism is profoundly humanist’ (Wald, in ‘Manualul’, 1968: 985).

In its more moderate form, this difference came up time and again in critics’ comments about the gap between what the subjects of research said and what they ‘really believed’ and ‘actually did’. This distinction indicated the contrast between investigating the contents of subjects’ consciousness and investigating the information they had about those contents (Bellu and Lupan, in ‘Stenograma’, 1965; Kallós and Roth, 1964). Sociologists proposed several methodological solutions to this problem, most notably making use of observation rather than questionnaires in the investigation of social practice (Ion Aluaş, in ‘Stenograma (continuare)’, 1965: 695–6). However, as it was associated with the interwar tradition of Romanian sociological research and with so-called ‘bourgeois science’, the reliability of observation as a method of collecting data would be constantly negotiated in the second half of the 1960s and the early 1970s. Sociologists professed mistrust in the apparent transparency of social phenomena and held to the belief that knowledge of the social can be mediated only through empirical (especially statistical) methods.

The way in which the positions were articulated in this methodological debate was not specific to state socialism. Especially the genealogy of the debate, with roots in the interwar period and consequences for the understanding of sociology's (social and political) role as a discipline long after the 1960s and into the post-socialist period, suggests parallels with the Positivismusstreit between the Frankfurt School and advocates of empirical sociology in Germany in the 1960s. Interpreted as a debate in the philosophy of history (and political theory) rather than just the philosophy of science, the Positivismusstreit ‘was concerned with what was realizable and what was unrealistically utopian in human society’ (Strubenhoff, 2018: 274). Interestingly, the criticism levelled by Romanian Marxist philosophers against the Frankfurt School in the 1960s and 1970s also concerned the latter's utopianism and its inability to account for real-existing socialism (Cistelecan, in press). As I discuss in the following section, the broader context of such criticism was the attempt to formulate a Marxist humanist approach to the social both in tune with the realities of state socialism and capable of underpinning their transformation, an approach distinct from the technocratic, social engineering aspirations of sociology.

Marxist humanism and the relationship between the individual and society

Social scientists’ engagement in the debate over Marxist sociology and empirical research in the first half of the 1960s allowed for a broader revision of Marxism-Leninism. In this context, a Marxist humanist discourse emerged, and its advocates took up the issue of the relationship between the individual and society in socialism. Though similar to other intellectual developments in East Central Europe, in Romania Marxist critique of real-existing socialism never underpinned reforms similar to those in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Observers such as the Radio Free Europe analyst Michael Shafir pointed this out already in the mid 1980s (Shafir, 1984). In conjuncture with the exceptional harshness of the Ceauşescu regime, the lack of ‘criticism from within’ has since endured as proof of Romania's exceptionalism in the region (rivaled only by Albania). This has made it difficult so far to reconstruct the main lines of argumentation in Marxist humanist social thought in Romania. This began to take shape across various branches of philosophy in the second half of the 1960s, parallel to the empirical research into social transformations under consolidated socialism.

The ‘humanism’ of Marxism, though often evoked beginning in the 1960s, was meant in the most general sense of tending to fundamental human needs such as employment, education, sociability, and so on. Yet several authors also sought to formulate a Marxist standpoint engaging in the contemporary debates about humanism, both within and outside the Eastern bloc. Among them, Niculae Bellu and Alexandru Tănase took part at the second Marxist–non-Marxist Humanist Dialogue, held in Herzeg Novi in August 1969, which brought together humanist scholars from across the globe to discuss the topic of ‘tolerance and revolution’. In their joint paper, Bellu and Tănase offered an analysis of revolutionary rupture and the concept of man developed under socialism. They contended that the move from ‘necessity’ to ‘freedom’ was not without contradictions, and delineated themselves from mere utopianism: ‘For we are not on the soil of a land of promise, where all dehumanizing and alienating phenomena are bound to disappear automatically, but in a world where man—the object and the product of a long and dramatic history, thus representing a contradictory spiritual reality—commits himself lucidly and with full awareness to his role as a creative subject of a new history’ (Bellu and Tănase, 1970: 80). An important source for them and other revisionist Marxist philosophers, as elsewhere in East Central Europe, were the early writings of Marx, especially the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (also referred to as the Paris Manuscripts), which had been published in Romanian in 1968, and Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, of which short excerpts had been available since the 1950s. Bellu introduced Grundrisse to the Romanian public in 1969, arguing that it contained crucial theoretical insights for a Marxist humanist theory that could account for the general and the individual, the objective and the subjective, and for necessity and freedom intertwined (Bellu, 1969: 8).

Other authors who had engaged in the debate over Marxist sociology also incorporated insights on the relationship between the individual and society in their work in axiology, scientific socialism, praxeology, or epistemology. In a volume published in 1968, Nicolae Kallós and Andrei Roth characterized axiology, or the study of values, in Marxist humanist terms, referring in particular to the anthropological concerns of Marx's and Engels's early works. When writing about the Marxist conception of the relationship between the individual and society, the authors argued that ‘society is never a simple sum of the individuals who are part of it, but the organic whole of the social relationships between individuals’ (Kallós and Roth, 1968: 37; emphasis in original). At the same time, they stated that individuals were not simply the result of the social relationships in which they were embedded; they were also relatively independent of them. This independence was ‘the foundation of one's existence as a moral being and as an axiological subject’ capable of both creating values and assimilating the values created by and circulated in society (ibid.: 39–40). In this way, Kallós and Roth conceived of individual freedom as constrained by the social conditions of the individual's existence. They conceptualized axiology as not only the study of societal values but also of the values of individuals, as participants in social relations as well as the subjects that create them. In his later work, Roth expanded the issue of the relationship between the individual and society to include aspects of generational differentiation and the question of how leadership related to individual social action, a subject much debated in the 1970s (Roth, 1986).

At the end of the 1960s, the study and further elaboration of theories of action were also grounded on Marxist humanist concerns. A symposium organized in 1969 by the Faculty of Philosophy at the Polytechnic Institute in Bucharest brought together Romanian researchers in the field of praxeology, who argued for the need to recover individual agency as a legitimate subject of research and who put forward a dialectical view of the individual as the agent and the product of action (Smirnov, 1969). An important source for Marxism humanism in general and theories of action in particular was contemporary East Central European philosophy. For example, the Polish philosopher Adam Schaff, whose studies, first published in French and then in Romanian translation, were widely available to social scientists in Romania, was an inspiration for the humanistic rereading of the early writings of Marx and Engels. The work of Tadeusz Kotarbiński also stimulated contemporary discussions in praxeology. Kotarbiński had constructed his theory of effective action as a Marxist humanist alternative to Talcott Parsons's theory, which was at the peak of its popularity in Western social science in the 1960s. As Romanian researchers noted at the time, both theories originated in concerns specific to the late 1930s, such as economic management, the optimization of production and administration, and the explanation of individual behavior (Popa, 1969). However, Kotarbiński's was preferred in Romania because he took the agent to be at the center of praxis (Tudosescu, 1969). Subsequent theories of action incorporated both Kotarbiński and Parsons into their analyses of political action and ideology. In the 1970s, the burgeoning Romanian literature on scientific management included them alongside insights from political sociology, economic cybernetics, and decision theory.

During the 1970s, the restructuring of the relationship between the individual and society was one of the main ideological tropes of scientific socialism, alongside the ‘multilaterally developed socialist society’, ‘the leading role of the working class’, or ‘the edification of socialist political relations’. Because it closely mirrored the language and content of party documents, historiography often equates scientific socialism with ‘propaganda’, yet despite the obvious strictures of the discipline, philosophers also worked within them successfully to articulate a humanist Marxist approach to the construction of socialism. Featuring the usual quotations from Marx and Engels, the criticism of capitalist social relations, references to recent party documents, and descriptive and prescriptive analyses of current social phenomena, Radu Florian put forward one such approach. According to Florian, a Marxist humanist take on the construction of socialism meant pursuing the elimination of social and individual alienation, freedom of association, democratic politics, and a social contract that ensured both social progress and the satisfaction of individuals’ interests. Florian argued that, despite the contradictions inherent in any historical development, what the socialist society was striving for was ‘the development of the individual as an aim in itself’. This marked a change in emphasis from previous discussions that described the relationship between individual and society as dialectical. Instead, the expectation explicit in Florian's analysis was that society would be restructured for the benefit of the individual. Intervening in one of the main debates of the 1970s over the scientific-technological revolution, he argued that scientific advancements should be managed for the benefit, not the further alienation, of the individual (Florian, 1975: 116–35).

By the end of the 1970s, Marxist humanist discourse had acquired broad currency in Romania. Mihu Achim noted in the preface to his volume about the human essence according to Marxism that one of the main obstacles to clarifying the issue was the unmanageable proliferation of literature on the subject following the publication of the Paris Manuscripts. Though the reference was to philosophical and social scientific thought in general, it included the development of a Marxist humanist discourse in Socialist Romania as well. His insistence on the fact that ‘human essence is the keyword of Marxism in its entirety’ (Achim, 1978: 6) was indicative of the extensive revision of Marxism-Leninism that had taken place during the previous two decades. Achim went back to the texts by Marx and Engels on the relationship between the individual and society scattered throughout their work in order to offer a hermeneutical analysis distinct from both previous exegeses of these texts and their (mis)appropriation in party documents. The change in tone from earlier accounts was dramatic. Presented as a careful, detailed, and objective textual reconstruction, Achim's book put into perspective both the flurry of Marxist humanist discourses on the subject in the 1960s and 1970s and the remoteness of their original source from existing social realities. Moreover, compared to accounts that assumed that a humanized relationship between individual and society had already been achieved, Achim consistently used the future tense in his analysis. He noted that Marx and Engels posited that individuals under communism would be endowed with self-consciousness, that is, awareness of their social nature acquired through changes in the objective circumstances of their existence. Such individuals would be entirely free to cultivate and manifest themselves through work, but would also understand that the complexity of production and the subsequent division of labor made authority necessary. Achim's future-oriented textual hermeneutical approach clearly also implied a criticism of existing social realities and of the ultimate failure of contemporary Marxist humanism to account for them. He concluded with a parallel between the dialectical relationship between the individual and society and the dialectical relationship between Marxist humanism and communism, thus closing the circle of revisionist Marxism opened almost a decade before (ibid.: 140–50).

Conclusions

The emergence of new ideas about the social in 1960s Socialist Romania, at the conjuncture of specialization in the social sciences and the revision of Stalinist Marxism-Leninism, speaks to the scholarship on the development of Romanian state socialism, to accounts about revisionist Marxist thought in the region, and to the recent literature on Cold War social sciences. Analyses of the evolution of the socialist regime in Romania from the perspective of party politics have emphasized the lack of opposition, failure of de-Stalinization, and the consolidation of neo-Stalinism in the late socialist period. These have overshadowed strands of social and political thought such as the humanist Marxism I discuss in this article, partly by interpreting it as a form of unsuccessful opposition, party by focusing on the ways in which it legitimized the regime. My own approach foregrounds the history of ideas not as a reflection of social and political realities, but as a complex genealogy grounded in institutional, intellectual, and generational/biographical dynamics. By reconstructing social thought on its own terms, the history of state socialism in Romania thus also reintegrates the efforts of a variety of actors to understand and contribute to social change in line with their political and moral commitments. Seen in a regional context, humanist Marxism in Romania has been compared with the cases in which revisionism either consolidated into a school of thought or veered into political reformism (such as the Budapest circle, the Praxis school, Czechoslovak reform communism, etc.). This has perpetuated claims of Romania's exceptionalism, as well as intra-regional hierarchies originating from the late socialist period. The fate of revisionist ideas in Eastern Europe can instead be understood within a broader framework of Cold War social thought and social sciences, with an interest in the mutual reception of knowledge between socialist and capitalist social scientists whose changing perception of each other—as competitors, as equals, or as lagging behind—should also be factored in.

Apart from being in dialogue with the existing historiography, this article addresses three clusters of issues pertaining to the history of postwar social thought that can be expanded upon comparatively, thematically, or chronologically. First, the intense boundary work of the early 1960s sheds light on the role of disciplinary specialization in the advancement of new ideas about the social in the postwar period. In Romania, the debate over the relationship between sociology and Marxism-Leninism signaled that core tenets of Marxist epistemology could be challenged. On the one hand, this brought ideas about collectivism from Stalinist social science under scrutiny; on the other hand, it led to the restructuring of the canon of Marxist-Leninist disciplines, and the (re-)emergence of several new ones. This raises the question of how competition among disciplines in the social sciences contributed to the entrenchment of specific ideas about the social under state socialism. In Romania, the popularity of sociology as a science for the management of the social was short-lived. By the end of the 1970s, both specialized education in sociology and professional opportunities in the field had been severely curtailed. The marginalization or de-institutionalization of sociology under state socialism has usually been interpreted as a measure of authoritarianism. The timing, however, is similar with the trend in Western (especially American) social science that saw sociology increasingly lose ground in the public and policy framing of social issues. This points to the need for an integrated history of social thought that acknowledges Cold War epistemic inequalities and their afterlife in the post-1989 sociological imaginary.

Second, this article has shown how social practice, individual and collective agency, and people's subjectivities became theoretically relevant in the 1960s, and were integrated, via empirical sociological research, into the reworked conceptual apparatus of post-Stalinist Marxism-Leninism. This complicates accounts about the role of quantification and theorization in postwar social science by foregrounding the intense reflection on the role of empirical research in sociology under state socialism. Originally emerging from the confrontation of Marxist-Leninist theory with social realities at the beginning of the 1960s, revisionist Marxism was briefly intertwined with empirical research. In Romania, and more generally in East Central Europe, the result of this convergence was conceptual innovation, as in the case of ‘socialist consciousness’. Research into the emergence of different topics in a regional context, and in dialogue with Western social science, for example the ‘scientific-technological revolution’, could clarify whether there was a specifically socialist approach to intertwining empirical and theoretical research of the social. Originally stemming from a blanket opposition to ‘bourgeois empiricism’, the critique of quantification under state socialism increasingly resonated with concerns among Western social scientists about a waning of the ‘sociological imagination’, even while social scientists under state socialism were decrying their own methodological backwardness. Reconstructing the perspective of the latter is essential for understanding the back and forth over issues of empirical and theoretical research in the 1970s, when academic exchanges became much more common.

Third, my analysis showed how the relationship between individuals and society became a topic of interest across social sciences in 1960s and 1970s Romania. This resonates with Anna Krylova's critique of the liberal view of Soviet modernity, which places collectivism at its core. Indeed, the Romanian case illustrates how ideas about collectivism and the relationship between individual and society changed from the 1950s, when the role of collective subjects in history was opposed to that of individual personalities; to the early 1960s, when collectivism allowed for individual achievement but curbed individualism; to the 1970s, when the relationship between individual and society was theoretically reworked within Marxist humanism, a cross-disciplinary strand of social thought. This emerged after empirical sociology and historical materialism had parted ways over their epistemological differences by the mid 1960s. Yet by the late 1970s, Marxist humanism was in its turn confronted with the social realities of socialist society, which the newly re-institutionalized discipline of sociology had studied empirically for over a decade. From this confrontation emerged the late socialist vision of socialist modernity, which accommodated both a resurgence of collectivist ideas about the nation and a budding neoliberal approach to the individual, and to which historians today look ever more intently for a historical recontextualization of the post-1989 transitions in the region.