“From my first meeting with him, I had the feeling that I was in the presence of an exceptional thinker” – Memories of Mircea Vulcănescu from the old gustian school

Mircea Vulcănescu, who also took part in the first campaign in Goicea Mare but then went to Paris to study political economy, had a very special place in Fundul Moldovei. From my first meeting with him, I had the feeling that I was in the presence of an exceptional thinker who seemed to belong to a different class from ordinary people, however talented they might be.

I had met him in Paris in 1927, when I don’t know how we managed to recognise each other as Romanians and students of Gusti, meeting in front of the files of the Bibliothèque Nationale.

At Fundul Moldovei, we started talking to him about how our work in Rușețu and Nerej had gone. Vulcănescu had only been involved in the Goicea Mare campaign, which he told me about in detail. I particularly remember his comments on the “sectarians” of Goicea, whom I had also met at Fundul Moldovei. The thesis he put forward was interesting, if somewhat paradoxical at first sight: do sectarians break away from the official state organisation because they hold certain unorthodox beliefs? Or, conversely, do they hold them because they break away from the state organisation? Vulcănescu’s comments were always paradoxical. One could always expect surprising points of view from him. On the basis of a table in which “sectarians” were listed in one column and “sewing machine owners” in another, and from the statistical processing of the correlation between these two sets of figures, Vulcănescu concluded that from the mass of peasants living in a patriarchal economy of self-consumption, a small but significant social group of incipient “peasant bourgeoisie” had emerged, artisans who worked for the market. Feeling ‘different’ from the masses, having money and using it, they were no longer willing to listen blindly to village traditions. They had their quarrels with the Town Hall and the State, but they were less reckless in their quarrels with the Church: as a sign of their dissatisfaction with all officials, they had adopted Adventism, an ideology that overturned tradition.

Obviously, the discussion with Vulcănescu could not lead to a plausible conclusion on the flimsy basis of a few dozen concrete cases. But in order to argue his thesis, Vulcănescu went to the highest theoretical levels, from Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas, Luther and the entire Protestant movement, including Max Weber, reviewing and analysing the entire literature on the sociology of religion in discussions in which one didn’t know what dominated: scholarship? Or the pleasure of exegetical virtuosity? In this respect, Vulcănescu was extraordinarily fruitful. Any ‘thesis’, once formulated, was seen by him in all its presuppositions and logical consequences, down to the most remote implications. When I presented my theses to him (the only one who really understood them), he also detected all the “chinks in their armour”, with all their logical consequences, and worked out for me a whole programme of sub-theses that still had to be put in place. Sometimes he would go on to explain to others what I was looking for, drawing theoretical conclusions I hadn’t thought of. I’d stop him and say, “Hang on, I didn’t say that!” To which he would angrily scold me: “You have done something very bad!” Sometimes Vulcănescu would put his hand on his pen and write down passages from my work for me, passages that I even kept intact in my own writing, so faithful were his substitutions in my way of thinking and so pleasant was it for me to mix his thoughts with mine.

At Fundul Moldovei, however, Mircea Vuclănescu did not carry out any field research, but concentrated on the theoretical work of clarifying Gustav’s sociology. It was also the professor’s wish that a small team should analyse the series of plans and questionnaires used so far, in order to put them in a systematic order. Vulcănescu, Ion Costin, Prejbeanu and myself were to work on this problem. In fact, the work was done by Vulcănescu. He worked constantly with Professor Gusti, specifying the concepts and logical schemes resulting from what the professor had said so far, and, in agreement with him, he put together a new scheme of the system, henceforth replacing the professor’s old scheme, the one published in the study on the sociology of war, with the final scheme, in which “social will” stands in the middle, between “frameworks” and “manifestations”.

This scheme does not belong to Vulcănescu but to Gusti, but its clarification, its logical and systematic exposition would not have been possible without Vulcănescu. There is, however, a personal contribution by Vulcănescu, at least in the formulations adopted by him, which gives a “phenomenological” nuance to the whole Gustian system. However, Vulcănescu never wrote a systematic exposition of Professor Gusti’s concept himself, limiting himself to formulating the old texts with more logical precision.

[…] Of all the monograph writers, Mircea Vulcănescu stood out the most, with his combative temperament, always in full action, taking the floor (and stubbornly monopolizing it) in all the debates that were held together or in private, always bringing new ideas, useful information and fundamental clarifications. It was really interesting to observe the way Mircea Vulcănescu understood how to work. He no longer thought about the “theoretical scheme” of the Gustian system, nor about the plans and questionnaires he was working on: the Fundul Moldovei phase was over for him. Instead, he was preoccupied with the problems of political economy, which had already begun to form his main professional qualification. But it seems to me characteristic of the way he was approached in Drăguș. It may seem to be a mere anecdotal memory, but it is more than that and therefore deserves to be told.

In Drăguș, a series of photographs and films were taken, and measures were taken to ensure that the “monographers” did not want to be in the “picture” and systematically avoided entering the field of the cameras. However, in certain circumstances, such as weddings (where the ‘godparents’ could sometimes be a pair of monographers), it was made compulsory for all monographers to dress in local peasant clothes so as not to distort the view of those they were passing through. It was a real pleasure for us to borrow what we needed from our hosts so that we too could show off our beautiful local costume. Mircea Vulcănescu was the only one who had difficulties in this respect, as he could not find any clothes that suited him. According to the locals, he looked more like a “poienărean”, so big and fat was he. So he searched all over the village, eager to buy, or at least order, clothes that would fit him. But in the whole village, asking all the people, he found that the clothes from Drăguș were priceless. No one had ever sold, bought or worked on human clothes as long as they had been known. They were all made in the village, by housewives, with village raw materials, with local technical means, for the native women and children of the village. This gave Vulcănescu food for thought and encouraged him to study the problem of the ‘natural’ household, which Karl Bucher had of course also dealt with in a classic work, but which he saw in a different light. The result was his excellent work The Theory and Sociology of Economic Life, published in 1932, but which departs from the starting point of “Drăguș” and covers distances as vast as those between Aristotle and Husserl.

After Vulcănescu, it is difficult to count other monographers in terms of their capacity for theorising.

(Henri H. Stahl – Memories and Thoughts from the Old School of “Sociological Monographs”, Minerva Publishing House, Bucharest, 1981, pp. 98-100, 144-145)