93 Facts About Traian Herseni

Traian Herseni was a Romanian social scientist, journalist, and political figure.

Traian Herseni was particularly interested in the peasant cultures and pastoral society of the Fagaras Mountains.

Traian 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.

Traian Herseni 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.

Traian Herseni 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, Traian Herseni was more genuinely committed to national communism.

Traian Herseni was a native of Transylvania, which, for most of his childhood, was an Austro-Hungarian province.

From 1924, Traian Herseni was a student at the University of Bucharest Faculty of Law, studying under Gusti, Constantin Radulescu-Motru, Nicolae Iorga, Ovid Densusianu, and Vasile Parvan.

Passionate about Gusti's attempts to restructure Romanian social science around rural sociology and participant observation, Traian Herseni was taken on board for Gusti's field trips to Nereju and Fundu Moldovei.

Traian Herseni, he writes, "appeared quiet, withdrawn; and yet not lonesome", "ready to take on whoever would oppose him, whether friend or rival".

Traian Herseni 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".

Traian 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.

Traian 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.

Traian Herseni enlisted at the Frederick William University, where he heard lectures by Werner Sombart, Eduard Spranger, Richard Thurnwald, and Alfred Vierkandt.

Traian Herseni published an overview of German sociology in Gusti's Arhiva pentru Stiinta si Reforma Sociala, praising it as a "lively and freely-moving science", and as a good model for sociology in "the less advanced countries".

Traian 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 Dragus, Runcu, and Cornova.

At Cornova, Traian Herseni focused on the social hierarchies and segregated clans of a Bessarabian community.

Traian Herseni spent some time researching on his own at a sheepcote in the Fagaras Mountains, publishing his results in Boabe de grau review.

Traian Herseni began contributing to the Cluj magazine Societatea de Maine, with articles that inventoried and examined the various kinds of social distance.

In 1932, Traian Herseni married a university and ISR colleague, Paula Gusty.

Traian Herseni was the daughter of Paul Gusty, a famous theater director.

Also that year, having lectured for a while at Sabin Manuila's School of Social Work, Traian Herseni was appointed by Gusti's an assistant professor in the University of Bucharest department of sociology, ethics and politics.

Traian Herseni 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 Stanga.

Traian Herseni declared himself a partisan of "social democracy" and class collaboration, "not a Marxist, and not a communist, but nevertheless a man of the left".

In 1933, shortly after the Nazi seizure of power, Traian Herseni visited Berlin, befriending there the anti-Nazi Romanian Petre Pandrea.

Traian Herseni was an enthusiastic promoter of sociological campaigns, famous as the ISR's "polygraph" and as Gusti's most orthodox interpreter.

Traian Herseni believed that objectivity could only be attained with self-imposed limitations and a laborious, preferably collective and interdisciplinary, research program.

Traian Herseni declared in 1934 that he followed Ernst Kantorowicz, who had defined sociology as, above all, an experimental science.

Traian Herseni adopted a tactic of publishing his work in stages, from raw studies in Societatea de Maine to monographic series, and finally to synthetic volumes and brochures.

Unlike Gusti, Traian Herseni shied away from public speaking, but was one of the ISR speakers at the 12th Congress of the International Institute of Sociology, held in Brussels in August 1935.

Traian Herseni continued to publish his sociological sketches in various magazines and newspapers.

Traian Herseni was a social-science columnist for Viata Romaneasca, added to the editorial team by Mihai Ralea, the left-wing sociologist.

In 1944, Traian Herseni described his joining of the Guard as a conscious rebellion against the establishment, prompted by his losing the competition at Cluj.

Herseni lost his post of assistant professor at the university, moving closer to the regional sociological school of Bukovina, which was headed by Guardist Traian Braileanu, becoming a regular contributor to Braileanu's journal Insemnari Sociologice.

Traian Herseni was able to outmaneuver his rival Golopentia, who was largely absent from the country during that interval.

When he returned, Traian Herseni offered a "truce", which included ceding Golopentia some of his classes at university.

Traian Herseni lectured there on the "social equilibrium of the Romanian village".

The text was a polemic with the Communist Party, which Traian Herseni described as having a "Jewish doctrine", whereas the Guard genuinely represented workers.

Traian Herseni directed rural sociology campaigns in Tara Oltului, publishing his findings as a series of volumes.

Traian Herseni published fragments from his history of sociology courses in various installments between 1938 and 1941 as well as a manual on the drawing of sociograms.

In January 1940, Traian Herseni was still affiliated with the Carlist regime, overseeing the creation of a state-sponsored National Students' Front; at the time, his wife was working as a schoolteacher in Petru Rares, south of Bucharest.

The looming threat of war and Romania's rapprochement with Nazi Germany sent the Gusti school into its final crisis: in summer 1940, Stahl was drafted and sent to work on the "futile" task of building up defenses; Traian Herseni helped him obtain his Ph.

Traian Herseni, emerging as a "major propagandist" and "prominent legionary ideologue", saluted the takeover in his articles for the Guardist paper Cuvantul.

Traian Herseni suggested a "racial purification", and a formal policy of racial segregation as "a question of life and death".

Traian Herseni was chosen for high office in the new bureaucracy, serving as Secretary General of a combined Ministry of Education and Culture, seconding Minister Braileanu.

Traian Herseni countersigned an order by Antonescu and Braileanu for the demotion and arrest of Petre Andrei, the previous Minister of Education, who was thus shamed into committing suicide.

Traian Herseni soon found himself drawn into the conflict between Sima and Antonescu, over the appointment of Guard loyalists at the Accademia di Romania.

Ralea was arrested by the authorities during November 1940, and possibly slated for an extrajudicial killing by he Guard, but Traian Herseni intervened and rescued his life.

Traian Herseni, now perceived as a "moderate" or "decent" Guardist, was able to escape the subsequent purge, and made his peace with the new military regime.

Traian Herseni resumed his scientific contribution with a treatise on the sociology of pastoralism, sponsored by the Romanian Academy, which was in some part a polemical study of folkloristics.

Traian Herseni condemned folklorists for working "at random", and asserted that ethnography in general needed to submit itself to the sociological method.

Traian Herseni contributed a chapter on Romanian sociology, including a sketch on himself, to a history of Romanian philosophy, put out in 1941 by Nicolae Bagdasar.

Traian Herseni justified his own inclusion by noting that "our [Herseni's] sociological activity has been recorded, through not always praised, by the country's greatest sociologists and a few foreign ones".

Traian Herseni sketched there the results of his epistemological inquiries: society was an objective inner reality, "the sense of an us", leading to the emergence of a "social community" that was therefore not biological, but spiritual.

On this basis, Traian Herseni read society as both a "spiritually objective" reality and a structural-functional one, and thus as an autonomous object of science.

From January 1942, Traian Herseni was behind the lines on the Eastern Front, in the newly occupied Transnistria Governorate.

Traian Herseni was mandated by Governor Gheorghe Alexianu to carry out a large ethnographic project, recording Romanian Transnistrian customs.

Traian Herseni was interested in what he termed "administrative sociology".

The official journal of Internal Affairs carried his topical essay, in which Traian Herseni called for a purely Romanian style of governance.

In early 1944, during the Soviet offensive in Transnistria, Traian Herseni was spotted in Berezovca County, on an official mission to destroy records of the mass killings of Jews.

Traian Herseni's name was published on a list of 65 former dignitaries indicted by the Radescu government as responsible for "bringing disaster upon the country".

Traian Herseni was re-arrested on January 29,1945, but released a while after.

Traian Herseni's sister died of cancer that same year, leaving Traian Herseni's nephews with almost no means to support themselves.

Traian Herseni himself was reportedly still working at the Hygiene and Public Health Institute in early 1946.

Again arrested on May 4,1951, Traian Herseni was tried for his role in the National Legionary administration, with Vianu showing up to defend him as a character witness.

Traian Herseni still remained under an interdiction to publish and was entirely marginalized in society, turning to ghostwriting for more politically suitable scholars.

Traian Herseni was officially only a regional director, and had a similar office at the Anthropological Center.

Traian Herseni was undergoing a slow rehabilitation, possibly facilitated by Communist Party activist Miron Constantinescu.

Traian Herseni produced a thesis according to which Romanians of that area were "always the overwhelming majority", having effortlessly Romanianized their Hungarian neighbors since the 1600s.

Bucur similarly argues that Traian Herseni stands as a prime example of an "openly racist" eugenicist whom the communist regime was able to recover for its own propaganda purposes.

Traian Herseni thus intended to return to his 1940 research and find a way to republish its early results.

Reportedly, Ralea excused Traian Herseni by arguing that he had only joined the Guard in hopes of being rewarded with tenure.

Shortly after making his return to publishing, Traian Herseni was set to be reactivated as a political writer, at the regime's behest.

In early 1963, the propaganda magazine Glasul Patriei was scheduled to reemerge as a venue for reformed and reeducated Iron Guardists; Traian Herseni was reportedly assigned to work on an essay called O eroare fundamentala: conceptia legionara despre muncitorime si taranime.

Traian Herseni involved himself in debates about the future of sociology, defending the science against criticism, and arguing that sociologists could answer specific problems that could not be addressed by statisticians or economists.

Traian Herseni worked instead with Bugnariu, with whom he co-authored an essay on the history of Gustian sociology, which appeared in Contemporanul in October 1964.

In 1968, Traian Herseni was allowed to travel abroad, to Paris.

Traian Herseni later set himself a study case of industrialization in Boldesti-Scaeni, where, as Stahl recounts, "a drilling rig had been set up, radically transforming the local, rural, social landscape, spurring modernizing social processes".

Also in 1969, Traian Herseni issued Psihosociologia organizarii intreprinderilor industriale, at Editura Academiei, and Laboratorul uzinal de psihologie, sociologie si pedagogie, at Editura Stiintifica.

In 1970, Traian Herseni spoke about his sociological and political convictions in an interview with Tribuna.

However, according to scholar Daniel Chirot, who visited Romania during that interval, Traian Herseni confessed to him in private:.

Traian Herseni made explicit references to "national psychology", linguistic determinism, and national "rhythms" of creativity, referencing the anthropological theories of Wilhelm Wundt, Franz Boas, George Murdock, and Edward Sapir.

Traian Herseni argued that structuralism was a relevant paradigm for the study of culture, but only if subsumed to "national specificity".

Traian Herseni criticizes Herseni's abundant use of "erudite" referencing, noting that it made the work outdated: working from inside a "captive society", Herseni had had access to Levy-Bruhl, but not to his critics.

Traian Herseni took his pension from the Psychology Institute in 1973, but carried on with his work in sociology and anthropology.

Also in 1974, Traian Herseni contributed to an Editura Stiintifica collection on industrial-sociological laboratories, with a study of social engineering techniques.

The book series signified a break with the Gustian tradition of strict sociology, turning to cultural anthropology, which the young Traian Herseni had criticized repeatedly.

Traian Herseni reviewed and categorized 400 colinde of Tara Oltului, noting that 88 of them had Christian "non-canonical" content, and another 124 where entirely non- or pre-Christian.

Traian Herseni's last published works include a French-language essay on the Dacian Draco, in which he argued that dragons or zmei were among the "primordial beings" of local mythology.

Additionally, Traian Herseni contributed a chapter in Romulus Vulcanescu's introduction to ethnology, a specialized field which Traian Herseni wanted to delimit from both anthropology and sociology as "the science of folk phenomena".

Traian Herseni left Teoria generala a vietii sociale omenesti, a manuscript comprising 1,276 pages, read by Stahl as a final synthesis "of his work in the realm of sociology".

Traian Herseni was more fully recovered and discussed after the Romanian Revolution of 1989, which lifted the ban placed by communism over most of his work.

Anthropologist Zoltan Rostas had by then contacted various of his colleagues, including Paula Gusty-Traian Herseni, publishing his interviews with them in various volumes, including the 2003 Sala luminoasa.