Dimitrie Gusti (1880-1955)

Romanian idealistic sociologist and philosopher. Founder of the Monograph School in Bucharest. Being an adept of voluntarism, Gusti thought that "social will" was determinant for social progress, and his view of social reality was eclectic, that is the reality is a bunch of events (economic, cultural, legal and political) which occur within some actually existing "social entities", say village, town, family etc. Gusti maintained that all such "events" at once suffered the influence of several factors (cosmological, biological, psychological and historical), and obeyed the "law of sociological parallelism". The autonomous "environments" which Gusti decomposes the society into, reveal his attraction to empiricism and his unawareness of the main sociological categories.

He launched and directed researches on a monograph series of the Romanian village, which eventually let actual data about the peasants' precarious existence in the meantime between the two world wars be acquired. The monograph series essentially contributed to making the rural customs and culture of the time better known.

Gusti was the founder and leader of the "Association for Social Science and Reform", of the Romanian Social Institute and the Romanian Village Museum, and the editor of journals such as "Archives for "Social Science and Reform" (1919-1943), "Romanian Sociology" (1936-1944), etc.

Main works: "Sociologia Militans" (1935) and "The Problem of Sociology" (1940).

Last update: 2004, October 27
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