Bren Alexandre

Romanian authors on the French territory:

Lucien Goldmann :

Lucien Goldmann was born on July 20, 1913 in Bucharest and died on October 8,1970 in
Paris. He grew up in Botoşani. He firstly studied in the university of Bucharest and after he
studied in the university of Vienna where he follows the courses of Max Adler an
Austromarxist Austrian jurist, politician and social philosopher.

In 1934 he went to the university of Paris to study political economy, literature and
philosophy. During the second world war, he moved to Switzerland (November 1942) and
was placed in a refugee camp until 1943. There he became the assistant of Jean Piaget, a
Swiss psychologist known for his work on child development and participates in his research
of genetic epistemology. Through Jean Piaget's intervention, he was subsequently given a
scholarship to the University of Zurich, where he completed his PhD in philosophy in 1945
with a thesis entitled Mensch, Gemeinschaft und Welt in der Philosophie Immanuel Kants
(Man, Community and world in the Philosophy of Immanuel Kant).

He tough that the Marxism was in a crisis and had to reinvent itself radically. He rejected the
traditional Marxist vision and challenged the structuralist movement. He did not think that the
future of humanity flowed from the inexorable laws of history, but rather saw them as Pascal
who considered the existence of God as a bet.

He was strongly influenced by the work of Georg Lukács. His work is characterized by a
singular materialist methodology. Partisan of a heterodox and humanist Marxism opposed to
all dogmatism, Goldmann sought to unify sociological and literary approaches by proposing a
new method, genetic structuralism, built in the extension of Jean Piaget's structuralism ( as we
can see in “The Hidden God”, 1959). Goldmann took a stand against both the antihumanist
structuralism of Louis Althusser (structure without subject) and against Sartre’s existentialism
(subject without structure), both of which, in his view, are opposed to dialectical thought.

Goldmann is a central figure in the history of the sociology of literature and the beginnings of
his institutionalization. The developments in the sociology of literature in French-speaking
areas attest to the importance of Goldmann's work in this area.
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Goldmann also participated in the Institute of Sociology of the Free University of Brussels,
where he created the Center for Sociology of Literature in 1961 before becoming director in
1964.

George Diamandy :

George Diamandy was a Romanian politician, dramatist, social scientist, and archeologist.
Although a rich landowner of aristocratic background, he was one of the pioneers of
revolutionary socialism in France and Romania, obtaining international fame as founder of
L'Ère Nouvelle magazine.

He was born in Idrici, Vaslui County or, by his own admission, in Bârlad in February 27,
1867 and died in December 27, 1917. His family was from the aristocracy. During his
childhood he was infected by malaria so he had to spend many times in France for cures. He
discovered the socialism and proletarian internationalism and he created with a friend a
Socialist Club and he published political articles in the review Contemporanul.

He moved in France and studied law at the university of Paris but didn’t really succeed so he
had to finish the rest of his license at the Caen Uiversity. He became a member of the Société
Anthropologique. He published notces on Cucuteni, as well as studies on Bulgarian
handicrafts and a sketch of Romanian anthropological criminology. He also completed, in
1891, the historical demography tract Dépopulation et repeuplement de la France (The
depopulation and repopulation of France).

He joined the socialist movement and animated a circle of socialist students, presided over by
the groupe of “International Revolutionary Socialist Student” at the time of its constitution
(December 1891) and he was delegated to the national congress of POF in Paris in 1893.

In 1893 he published the first issue of a “monthly for scientific socialism”, L’Ere Nouvelle
that hosted article by Marxist thinkers from Europe. He later participated in the journal Le
Devenir social, which appeared from April 1895. After performing for some time as a
calculator prodigy in circuses, he returned to Romania in 1898 when the death of his father
left him at the head of a fortune. In Bucharest, he continued to campaign in the Romanian
socialist movement, entered the newspaper Lumea Noua where he was more particularly in
charge of the question of universal suffrage

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He has an impact on the French Left in particular with his magazine “L’ère Nouvelle because
it was, as Diamandy said himself “France’s first Marxist magazine”.

Dimitrie Gusti :

Dimitrie Gusti was born in February 13, 1880 and died on October 30, 1955. He was a
Romanian sociologist, ethnologist, historian, and voluntarist philosopher; a professor at the
University of Iaşi and the University of Bucharest, he served as Romania's Minister of
Education in 1932–1933. Gusti was elected a member of the Romanian Academy in 1919,
and was its president between 1944 and 1946. He was the main contributor to the creation of a
new Romanian school of sociology.

He studied letters at the University of Iasi. He moved to Universität unter den Linden, the first
courses attended are Friedrich Paulsen's Philosophy and Georg Simmel's Sociology .He also
went to the University of Leipzig, where he studied and completed a doctorate in Philosophy.
In 1905, he began the study of Sociology, Law, and Political economy at the Universität unter
den Linden. Gusti was appointed to the Department of Ancient History, Ethics and Sociology
of the University of Iaşi in 1910, and was one of the main contributors to the creation of a
new Romanian school of sociology. He moved to Bucharest in 1920, and began work as a
professor at the University of Bucharest, in the Department of Sociology, Ethics, Politics and
Aesthetics of the latter's Faculty of Letters and Philosophy. He organized the monographic
research of the Romanian villages (and created the Village Museum in Bucharest), he initiated
the young people to the practice of field research, thus laying the foundations of an authentic
sociological school.

He did not live in France but he brought new concepts to the French sociology (he wrote some
articles and books in French language) and, more globally, the international sociology.

Petre Andrei:

Petre Andrei was born in June 29, 1891 and died on October 4, 1940. He was born in Brăila in
a family of low-ranking servants. He studied literature and philosophy in the university of
Iasi. He continued is education in Berlin and in Leipzig. After volunteering in the army of the
war, he presented is thesis Filosofia valorii in 1918 and became doctor in philosophy. After

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that he began to study sociology. From 1927 to 1930 he headed the local magazine Minerva
dedicated to cultural synthesis. He published several articles in sociology.

Dimitrie Drăghicescu :

He was born on 4 May 1875 in Zăvoieni. After finishing a grammar school, he attended Carol
I High School in Craiova. He also studied in the law faculty of Bucharest University. In 1901
he went to Paris and studied at the Collège de France with Emile Durkheim, Gabriel de Tarde,
Henri Bergson and Theodule Armand Ribot. He also attended the lectures organized by the
Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques.

On May 1904 he obtained a doctor degree in Sociology and in 1905 he became associate
professor of Sociology in the university of Bucharest.

He also lived in France from 1916 to 1918 and promoted the ideas of a national Romanian
state. On 9–12 April 1918 he attended the "Congress of Nationalities" in Rome with Nicolae
Lupu and Simion Mândrescu, as members of the group supporting the right of Romanians to a
state within their national ethnic borders and demanding the recognition of Romania as a
cobelligerent country.

He committed suicide in 1945.

Henri Stahl :

Henri H. Stahl was born in 1901 and died in September 9, 1991. He was a Romanian Marxist
cultural anthropologist, ethnographer, sociologist and social historian.

He was born in Bucharest in a family of French and Swiss ancestry, he was the son of Henri
Stahl (a promoter of stenography). After law studies he became interested by the work of
Dimitrie Gusti. He became professor of Sociology in the university of Bucharest and he also
assisted Gusti for the creation of monographs dedicated to Romanian villages, with him and
Victor Ion Popa they established the Bucharest Village Museum.

He was supporting Austromarxism. He contributed to Dreapta, a nationalist magazine but left

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He published many articles and several in French (like for example Nerej, un village d’une
region archaique or Les anciennes communautés villageoises roumaines, asservissement et
penetration capitaliste).