Trei în unu sau Despre cum încap dreapta, stânga şi centrul în aceeaşi oală. O
Three in One. Notes on How the Right, the Left and the Center Fit Together

Summary/Abstract: In this article I address the pluralistic ideological and political format of an intellectual and research group active in interwar Romania, and the difficulties raised by this characteristic in situating the group in one fixed and monolithic ideological or political cluster. After World War I and the Paris Peace Treaty, the provinces of Transylvania, Bessarabia and Bukovina were annexed to the Old Kingdom, and “Greater” Romania came into existence, bringing about difficult and complex problems of nation building and social reform. Sociological research and social action seemed one possible way of addressing the crisis of Romanian society. Thus, during the late 1920s and especially in the 1930s, a large social and national research and action program emerged. In this paper I argue that the Bucharest Sociological School functioned as an intellectual and sociological research group whose ideological and political development and orientation mirrored the Romanian public sphere, thus ensuring the School a pluralistic format. The primary research method is analysis of the some of the oral history documents provided by Zoltán Rostás’ broad project of interviewing the members of the School mostly during the 1980s. I compare the discourses of the first and the second generations of monographers as recorded in oral history interviews with the goal to provide an alternate reading of the ideological and political orientations of the Sociological School founded and coordinated by Dimitrie Gusti.

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