Path Dependency, World Systems Analysis, or Alternative Modernity? Research Notes on Interwar Romania and the Bucharest Sociological School

Abstract

This article assesses the concept of alternative modernity from the perspective of the social modernization and nation-building projects undertaken by the Bucharest Sociological School during the interwar period. The analysis commences with a critique of the theoretical field that hitherto provided the principal explanatory models for understanding interwar Romania, namely the concept of path dependence and world systems theory. It then proceeds to scale down the comparative civilization approach underpinning alternative modernities theory into a more discrete, socially-grounded definition of alternative modernity appropriate to the specific time period and local context. This is accomplished, on the one hand, by means of a critical assessment of recent scholarship pertaining to the alternative modernity of interwar Romania and, on the other hand, by foregrounding the issues of local agency and geopolitical context. I thus argue that the vision of an alternative, quintessentially rural and “Romanian” modernity elaborated by the Bucharest Sociological School was inserted into the social structure by means of a culturally specific program of socio-economic modernization of the rural world. This program was consciously elaborated as a sociologically informed alternative to the dominant, urban forms of modernity prevailing in the West.