Sociology versus Ideology in Communist Romania: Sociology’s Re-Emergence and Role

The Communist Party of China and Ideology

Nationalism versus Internationalism: The Roles of Political and Cultural Elites in Interwar and Communist Romania

This paper has two main goals. First, it illuminates continuities between the ideas of “true Romanian-ness” as held by both the Romanian cultural elite and the Romanian political regimes in the interwar and communist periods. A manufactured definition of a “true” Romanian—as a Romanian Orthodox Christian, natively Romanian-speaking, and ethnically Romanian—formed the core of Romanian nationalis...

Emergence in Sociology

Many accounts of the micro-macro link use the philosophical notion of emergence to argue that collective phenomena are collaboratively created by individuals yet are not reducible to explanation in terms of individuals. However, emergence has also been invoked by methodological individualists; they accept the existence of emergent social properties yet claim that such properties can be reduced ...

Confronting the Past: Corruption in Post-Communist Hungary and Romania

Why are some states more corrupt than others? More specifically, why is post-communist Romania significantly more corrupt than post-communist Hungary even though both transitioned to democracy from USSR satellite states in 1989 and both went on to enter the European Union? This paper argues that though the implementation of communism in political institutions at the time of transition cannot se...

Emergence and Communication in Computational Sociology

Computational sociology models social phenomena using the concepts of emergence and downward causation. However, the theoretical status of these concepts is ambiguous; they suppose too much ontology and are invoked by two opposed sociological interpretations of social reality: the individualistic and the holistic. This paper aims to clarify those concepts and argue in favour of their heuristic ...