[1] For the social sciences at large, the rise and predicament of Romanian political science, as important an experience as it may be for Romanian academia, is a topic fated to a certain degree of obscurity. On an individual basis, Romanian scholars may seek respectability and recognition in the international scientific community, but no one would expect them to collectively set the tone for political science. And it is only fair to say that marginality is perhaps the inescapable fate of all political science enterprises in Central and Eastern Europe. For American, British, German, French, and even Italian political sciences are not only dominant, but also self-reliant and self-sufficient. Therefore, it would be more interesting to look at what Romanian political science is, rather than at what it does or tries to do. That is to say that Romanian political science can be noteworthy only to the extent it is comprehended as a political object in its own right, regardless of the political objects it currently creates, addresses, and explores.
[2] If we adopt Theodore Lowi’s contention that the way we study politics usually conforms to the politics we study, i.e., that every regime has the inclination to produce a politics consonant with itself and that, subsequently, every regime also tends to generate a political science consistent with itself 2 (Note2: Theodore J. Lowi, "The State in Political Science: How We Become What We Study", in: American Political Science Review, 86, no. 1, 1992, 1-7.), then it follows that, in becoming aware of what Romanian political science tries to be, we might just learn something about Romania’s post-communist polity and politics.
[3] Seemingly, such a functional assessment does not do violence to a substantial and refined body of literature. Indeed, Romanian political science never actually existed and it is still on the fringes of existence. This explains to a large extent the popularity enjoyed after 1989 by all sorts of writings on and about politics that seem to indicate to a naive eye that the discipline itself has taken off. This statement is paradoxical only at first glance, since a science embedded in strong theoretical traditions and empirical expertise does not usually easily find popular favor. For there can be free admittance only to those intellectual territories that are not yet methodologically mapped and conceptually chartered. As soon as an intellectual terrain is colonized by a given science, admittance is regulated by a number of restrictions and exclusions. Academic clearance and scientifically approved blueprints are henceforth needed.
[4] Indeed, if the very notion of "scientific discipline" is epistemologically weak, it is nevertheless indisputable that it has a clear social content to the extent it acknowledges the existence within the intellectual arena of a distinct group of "specialists" defined by certain rules of scientific production and reproduction. Let us take for granted that a scientific discipline is fully established when at least four criteria are fulfilled 3 (Note3: E.g. Pierre Favre, "Histoire de la science politique", in: Madeleine Grawitz and Jean Leca, editors, Traité de science politique, I, Paris: PUF, 1985, p. 4.): consensus on the very name and purpose of the discipline; agreement on the topics that fall within the purview of the discipline and that can be satisfactorily addressed by no other branch of science; a number of institutions of education and research recognized and legitimated by the academic community; the accumulation of a sufficient amount of resources and tools, such as journals, textbooks, publication series, colloquia, conferences, and the like.
[5] My argument is that three of these four criteria are not yet completely met, despite the quite impressive quantity of translations, essays, commentaries, books, and articles related to politics that are currently published in Romania. First of all, there is no consensus on the appropriate name for the study of politics. Political science, political studies, political sciences 4 (Note4: This form has obvious interdisciplinary and eclectic connotations and could be explained in two ways: either as an abbreviation of the "political and social sciences" of the pre-1989 period, or as an acknowledgement that the label of the study of politics covers a broad association of disciplines, international relations being the most valued. Nevertheless, international relations are explicitly not taken into account in this survey, since in Romania they tend to form a self-sufficient and separate sub-discipline in terms of research teams, methods, and objectives.), and "politology" are still indistinctly used, both in academia and by the media. Second, there is no accord among "specialists" on what exactly the science of politics is and does, and there is even an insidious doubt - among some sociologists, for instance - that a separate science of politics can or should exist at all. Finally, Romanian political scientists did not begin to publish books based on original thorough empirical or theoretical research until, at the earliest, the end of the first post-communist decade; moreover, the first Romanian academic peer-reviewed journal of political science was not published until 2001. The only criterion that seems to be somehow satisfied is the institutional one, since there are several solid departments of political science and a fair number of graduates from them. Nevertheless, even on this level, it is still unclear whether political science has a name and a realm of its own. Paradoxically enough, two out of the three major departments do not teach political science as a discipline in its own right.
[6] To wind up, a common understanding of politics and its science does not seem to exist in Romania. There are still reservations about the possibility of scientifically explaining politics on the basis of endogenous approaches, as political science claims to be able to do 5 (Note5: Giovanni Sartori, "From the Sociology of Politics to Political Sociology", in: Seymour M. Lipset, editor, Politics and Social Sciences, New York: Oxford University Press, 1969: 65-100.). In the eyes of many Romanian social scientists, politics seems to be the mere anecdotal surface of otherwise deep-rooted social and economic phenomena. Politics is commonly seen as driven mainly by societal incentives and economic stimulus, as devoid of its own rationality, and virtually always as commanded by an external rationale. Therefore, it is probably safe to say that, at least in this respect, dialectic and historical materialism has probably lost much of its reputation but not all of its influence.
[7] To be ironically faithful to Marxist teleology, this situation should be referred to as a sublation, meaning, as Hegel did by this term, that scientific socialism is concurrently cancelled and preserved in the make-up of post-communist political science. This survey tries to explore the reasons for this vernacular survival of an unexpectedly enduring Marxism-Leninism beyond the demise of both communism and its scientific explanation of history and society.
[8] In pre-communist Romania, political science practically did not exist as an autonomous field of teaching and research. For a short time after 1918, the University of Cernăuţi, an institution of higher education established under Austrian rule, inherited a political science chair held by Alexandru Papacostea, an insulated and unavailing scholar who died in 1927 with no scientific posterity. In 1924, the School of Law at the University of Bucharest created a doctoral degree in "political and economic sciences", to be granted after a two-year curriculum. As late as 1938, an Institute of Moral and Political Sciences was created within that School of Law to provide an institutional framework for PhD law students who had an academic interest in politics. The approach to politics at this Institute was merely a legal one, political science being studied as the science of the State, very much in the manner it was - and sometimes still is - practiced in the French Facultés de Droit. At any rate, the Institute did not live long enough to contribute to the birth of political science as an academic discipline, since it was closed down in the early 1940s. But it is worth mentioning because Ghita Ionescu, editor of the British Journal Government and Opposition and a distinguished scholar of communism (Ionescu, 1964, 1967) and of the political process of European integration, was educated there.
[9] One of the reasons for political science’s precarious institutional set-up in pre-communist Romania was the overall triumph of sociology, itself a newborn discipline after World War I. In the view of Dimitrie Gusti, the prominent founder and mastermind of Romanian sociology and the chairman of the Romanian Social Institute, sociology should have been and was actually considered to have become the complete - both normative and descriptive - science of the nation, which could answer all the questions raised by the social, economic, and political life of the Romanian national community. For instance, the critical legal and political question "what kind of Constitution does Greater Romania need?" was regarded as belonging to the field of an inclusive social science understood and practiced as the overall science of the nation. In this setting, even a conspicuous political object like political parties received a philosophical-sociological treatment (Negulescu, 1926) ignorant of and indifferent to the well-established international political science literature of that time.
[10] This particular variety of sociology, which emphasizes and investigates the national community as an indivisible structure and is therefore uninterested in and avoids the study of divisions and conflicts, owed its undisputed predominance to the mainstream intellectual tradition marshaled around the "social question". Before and after World War I, it was incumbent on any major Romanian social thinker to address the twofold issue of a resilient peasant society allegedly reluctant to give birth to a viable domestic bourgeois middle class. Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea, Constantin Stere, Constantin Rădulescu-Motru, Ştefan Zeletin, Şerban Voinea, Mihail Manoilescu, Virgil Madgearu, Lucreţiu Pătrăşcanu, and Dimitrie Gusti himself explored this question and its political consequences along various theoretical lines ranging all the way from orthodox and revisionist Marxism to corporatism.
[11] As politically incorrect as it may seem today, Mihail Manoilescu was the pre-communist Romanian political author who enjoyed the widest and longest-lasting international reputation. Not only he was the leading European theorist of corporatism in the very age of corporatism (Manoilescu, 1941), but also his thinking is considered to have provided the ideological framework for the Brazilian Estado Novo and its subsequent authoritarian incarnations. His political economy is apparently still in use in some South American universities. Albeit an economist by training and intent, Manoilescu developed an articulate theory of party-state relations in a totalitarian regime, embedded in extensive first-hand observation. His analysis distinguished between German, Italian, and Soviet versions of totalitarianism, seeing the first as a dual political system with powers shared equally by the state bureaucracy and the party elite, the second as a state using the party for its own purposes, and the third as a state utterly controlled by the party.
[12] To construct as accurate a genealogical table of the discipline as possible, it should be remarked that, despite the institutional monopoly of legal studies and the intellectual eminence of sociology, such authors as Marcel Ivan and Mattei Dogan nevertheless undertook proper and valuable empirical research in political science in the 1930s and 1940s, mainly in the area of electoral participation and party performance. A consummate statistician, Ivan published a highly formal survey of the electoral conduct of the political parties that emerged in the aftermath of World War I (Ivan, 1933). After authoring a comprehensive analysis of inter-war Romanian politics (Dogan, 1946), Mattei Dogan left Romania to become an outstanding voice in French political sociology (e.g. Dogan, 1982, 1990). This type of quantitative analysis, which tried to crossbreed statistics and sociology and which was as close to formal political science approaches as we find, had no follow-up in Romania.
[13] Immediately after the communist takeover, a political school was established to ensure, first, ideological control, and later the Party’s monopoly over the social sciences. Created in 1945 as the Party’s training unit for its own rank and file under the name of the Ştefan Gheorghiu Academy for Training and Advancement of the Leadership Cadres of the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party, this institution was designed as an ideological training center for Party activists and state bureaucrats. Several types of curricula were offered. Short-term studies (usually six months) were intended for all party members selected for various responsibilities either in the Party apparatus or in public administration. More thorough post-graduate studies, including a doctorate, were offered to those who had chosen to become ideological trainers for the Party, journalists, or merely scientific socialism instructors for institutions of higher education. In 1969, an institute of economic management was attached to the Party Academy to provide professional expertise to the chief executive officers of the public sector economy.
[14] One year later, an Academy of Political and Social Sciences was established under the authority of the Propaganda Division of the Central Committee. In the wake of the "mini-cultural revolution" of 1971, the institution’s task was to explore the procedures to be followed to translate an untidy ideological control into a tight scientific monopoly. The mission was accomplished in 1975, when the new Academy held sway over all research institutes in history, law, philosophy, sociology, art history, and other social sciences previously subordinate to the old Romanian Academy. In this way, the official politics of the social sciences shifted from supplying general orientation and providing casual censorship to direct involvement in research policies, programs, planning, tools, methods, and teams.
[15] In scale and scope, these changes in the politics of science mirrored a critical and major transformation of the official science of politics. Indeed, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the teaching of the Ştefan Gheorghiu Academy was no longer embedded in orthodox Marxism-Leninism, and prominent figures of early scientific socialism, such as Radu Florian, lost much of their influence. As the Party itself changed its methods of social mobilization and inclusion, the official ideology framed by the Party Academy became more concerned with development issues, economic management, and technological revolution. How to escape backwardness and establish a modern economy were the topics addressed by theoreticians like Mircea Maliţa and Mihai Botez, who never questioned the political monopoly of the Party, even when they turned into dissidents, as Botez eventually did. In fact, for this line of thinking, which prefigures the Chinese pragmatism of the 1980s and 1990s, politics was not viewed as being essential, but as really existing only in the form of good policies of economic growth and social improvement. This new scientific course roughly coincides with a short period of political de-Stalinization.
[16] Some outstanding authors, however, did emerge from, if not against, this background. In the long run, the most influential of them in terms of the discipline turned out to be Vladimir Tismăneanu. Unsurprisingly, he started in Romania as a liberal student of Euro-Marxism (Tismaneanu, 1976), to later become, once reborn as an American political scientist, a scholar of civil society in Central and Eastern Europe (Tismaneanu, 1991) and a stern critic of anti-liberal and radical intellectual and political trends in the region (Tismaneanu, 1998). In the 1990s, he served as a role model and mentor for numerous Romanian political scientists. The second to deserve special mention is Pavel Câmpeanu, a communist militant in his early stages, who evolved into a significant student of Stalinism (Câmpeanu, 1986) and who, in the late 1980s, was the Romanian voice in the seminars that the New School of Social Research in New York opened to prominent dissidents from Central and Eastern Europe.
[17] Three other major scholars, although not political scientists by training or vocation, bordered on the study of politics. Two of them were confessed and innovative Marxists, the third a resolute anti-Communist. Henri H. Stahl, the revered proponent of Romanian social history and of the national sociological tradition, had an original hand in the Marxist theory of the modes of production (Stahl, 1979). Zigu Ornea, a literary historian, substantiated some of the major trends of Romanian political and social thinking (e.g. Ornea, 1969). The third, the historian Vlad Georgescu, not only published invaluable quantitative studies on the framing of the public space and the evolution of Romanian political ideas (Georgescu, 1972, 1987), but also, as an émigré, headed the Romanian department of Radio Free Europe. Be it as it may, these authors did not tone up the Romanian intellectual landscape, for in the late 1970s and during the 1980s, the social sciences sagged under the weight of a hegemonic national communism. As for the study of politics, the stage belonged to theoreticians no longer disposed to base their interpretation of social and political life on classical Marxist theory or on the critique of backwardness, but on the works of Nicolae Ceauşescu, the unchallenged leader of the Romanian Communist Party. For them, politics existed only in the shape of Romanian national interest. The leading character of this cast was undoubtedly Ovidiu Trăznea, chairman of the exclusive, Party-members-only Romanian Association of Political Science, which set up in 1968. In this role, he was the official political scientist of the regime (Ceterchi, Trăznea, and Vlad, 1979).
[18] Notwithstanding this development, the various interpretations of politics under communism shared the common belief that social life cannot be explained in political terms and that, therefore, political science had no reason to exist and that its task, whatever it may have been earlier, is far better accomplished by other sciences, above all economics. Yet, such an approach is compelled to use a rhetorical structure that finally lends itself to justifying the very presumptions it professed to deny: the autonomy of politics and the legitimacy of a science of politics. The various intellectual shapes assumed by Romanian scientific socialism (orthodox, liberal, developmental, nationalist) could not or would not abandon their Leninist roots and the revolutionary-type circular reasoning such roots entail. A sound Marxist assumption indicates that politics is closely tied to and dependent upon class structures and economic relations. On this account, politics should be meaningless in the face of knowledge. Nevertheless, Leninism assumed and indeed proved that politics might in fact invent class structures and economic relations. So what is the place of political science in this setting? Under state socialism, the science of politics equals political action itself. Its practitioner is the government, and the government alone. Political science would therefore be the self-consciousness of the government, a government that acts - in Marxist terminology - not only in itself, but also for itself. Political science was subsequently the study of Party policies and Party language, inasmuch as they tried to respond to the people’s scientifically validated wants. As a consequence, the understanding of politics in Romania before 1989 was not only wants-oriented, rather then rights-based, but also verged on a perverse form of public choice theory. Curiously, if not ominously, this is the major lesson post-communist political science has learned from scientific socialism.
[19] If a unified paradigm is needed to give rise to a scientific discipline 6 (Note6: Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1962: 10-13.), it is unquestionable that such a broad intellectual construct, based on a series of common observations and shared assumptions, did not immediately emerge after 1989 in the Romanian academia as far as political science is concerned. On the contrary, Romanian social scientists ever since seem to follow at least two separate and contending sets of instructions on where to look for the appropriate explanations of what politics is. And they do so in a rather intuitive way. They move instinctively within disconnected "disciplinary matrices", to use Thomas Kuhn’s words, according not only to the intellectual experiences they went through before 1989, but also to their different understandings of how and why scientific research should be organized. For the sake of clarity, let us call these two paradigms post-Marxist-Leninist and neo-Weberian, bearing in mind that they are not to be interpreted as evidence of a fully conscious operation of theoretical and methodological choice. Rather, these paradigms have themselves recruited their proponents, for most Romanian political scientists qualify as "unconscious thinkers" impaired by theoretical unawareness who react to the change in political regime and to the expansion of democratic politics by spontaneously resorting to "conceptual stretching" 7 (Note7: I borrow these notions and their meaning from Giovanni Sartori, "Concept Misformation in Comparative Politics", in: American Political Science Review, LXIV, no. 4, 1970: 1033-1053.): they merely strain their old methods and language to cover a broader and far more diverse array of political issues than the ones tackled a decade before.
[20] The first stream cuts across various scientific contexts and methodological assumptions to adopt an all-inclusive public choice idiom for which politics is a dependent variable that rests upon the overriding problem of acquisition, as conceived by Marx. This is tantamount to saying that economy-based relationships and relative scarcity command the configuration of public interests as expressed in the political arena. Consequently, property ownership, deprivation, impoverishment, government performance, and party competition for control of the means of production and to appropriate the voter’s consciousness become the linchpins of politics.
[21] The second paradigm pulls several intellectual threads together to convey the overall idea, of Weberian descent, that the collapse of communism and the social deconstruction it induced should be experienced as an opportunity to establish a new political bond, if not a new social contract (Vergesellschaftung). Hence, politics is held to be a rationalization of public conducts within a system of meanings (Sinnzusammenhänge), which takes in such categories of beliefs as legitimacy, the demystification of authority, the production of and conformity to norms, and the function of the market.
[22] And if this is the case, if indeed there are two ways of explaining what politics is all about 8 (Note8: In approximating the two paradigms, I have followed the systematization of Andrew C. Janos, Politics and Paradigms. Changing Theories of Change in Social Sciences, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1986.), then it follows that Romanian political science, as a newborn academic field of study and research, had no real intellectual opportunity to grow into a coherent and self-sustained discipline. For the dialectics of continuity versus change not only marked the evolution of paradigms, but also largely commanded the process of the institutionalization of political science.
[23] Even if democracy superseded state socialism quite unexpectedly, those at home in scientific socialism in its developmental-nationalist Romanian version were not caught by surprise. Not that they foresaw the event, but they were, above all, experts in the politics of social sciences. So they changed their vocabulary without unwrapping their understanding of politics from its Leninist core and, above all, without reshuffling their personnel. Trăznea was naturally re-elected to chair the Romanian Association of Political Science 9 (Note9: To this day, the Romanian Association of Political Science is among the "living dead", i.e., it nominally exists, but has no activity. In 1999, a group of junior faculty and students from the Department of Political Science at the University of Bucharest Romanian Society of Political Science.), while his younger colleagues (Vasile Secăreş, Vladimir Pasti, Cornel Codiţă, Ioan Mircea Paşcu, Paul Dobrescu) immediately went to serve as advisors to the post-communist president and to the National Salvation Front leadership, while engineering the survival of the Party Academy. They spontaneously followed what might be called a logic of appropriateness, as opposed to a logic of consequence, which would have naturally eliminated them from the public square. As a group, they did not see democracy as a radical political consequence of the communist collapse. Instead, they were ready to embrace a kind of "state democracy" as an appropriate instrument to satisfy the economic and social wants that state socialism failed to fulfill. The collapse of communism did not even automatically root out all institutions linked to Marxism-Leninism and scientific socialism. They simply reshaped themselves, taking on new names and embarking on new missions, but not changing their frame of mind.
[24] The Ştefan Gheorghiu Academy of the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party is perhaps the foremost public institution that has survived, almost unimpaired, the breakdown of the communist regime. To wash away their previous commitment to scientific socialism, its teaching staff first sought to join the University of Bucharest. But they soon came to understand that there would be no Schuldfrage debate to question their past and that they could afford to stand up again as an influential group. Thus, in the fall of 1991, the government decided to refinance the former Academy as a public institution under the name the National School of Political Studies and Public Administration. For all intents and purposes, this institution, presided over by Vasile Secăreş, the last secretary of the communist cell of the Party Academy, and Ovidiu Trăznea, chairman of the Department of Political Science until 1996, preserved the goal and structure as well as most of the faculty of the former Party Academy. Even the institute created in the late 1960s to provide management skills to high officials of the socialist economy continued to be associated with the National School under the label IROMA (The Romanian Institute of Management). A two-year course of general training in international relations and public administration and policies was offered to candidates from various academic backgrounds to enable them to take civil servant positions. Not until 1995 did the National School of Political Studies and Public Administration start to organize undergraduate studies in political science, public administration, and journalism. Since 1998, a one-year graduate program has been added every fall, the specializations covered being gender studies, development and governance, international relations, and political anthropology. The School now has three departments - political sciences (chaired by Adrian Miroiu, a former editor of the Communist Party’s own publishing house), public administration, and journalism (headed by Paul Dobrescu, the last secretary of the communist cell of the Party’s official newspaper). It is currently establishing two new departments, sociology and economics.
[25] Meanwhile, after rejecting the survivors of the Party Academy, the University of Bucharest decided to foster its own program of training and research in political science. At first, between 1991 and 1994, the department assigned to this mission was cast in the same mold as a French Institut d’Etudes Politiques. This explains why political science was first taught in French and why its roots lay mostly in European studies, legal studies, and political philosophy, and less in quantitative research. As of 1995, the Department of Political Science was restructured with the aim of developing three directions of undergraduate study in the major of political science: political science, international relations, and public policy. Ever since, the methodological groundwork of the curricula is commanded by a variety of theoretical and empirical orientations, which tend to be increasingly "Americanized". As a consequence and to make this diversity of approaches more transparent, the department’s languages of instruction are English, French, and Romanian. The department currently enrolls almost one thousand undergraduate and graduate students, making it the largest institution to serve the discipline. Foreign students (from France, Sweden, the United States, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, Lebanon, Turkey, Tunisia, Iraq, Albania, Cameroon, Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Guinea, and Moldova) sometimes comprise 10% of this population, which is definitely unusual for Romanian higher education institutions in the field of social sciences and which tends to confirm that the department has acquired a fair international reputation. Today, most of the regular faculty members have at least one degree from a Western European university and are either recruited from research institutes or selected from among young graduates. In fact, the first generation of Romanians to hold a regular BA degree in political science graduated from the University of Bucharest in 1995.
[26] The next generation, of 1996, was trained in the second-largest Romanian university, the University Babeş-Bolyai of Cluj-Napoca, which started its own chair of political science within the Department of History in 1992 and restructured it in 1995 as an autonomous Department of Political Science and Public Administration. This was a critical juncture for the history of the teaching of political science in Cluj, since the department gradually distanced itself from the pre-1989 chair of scientific socialism, in which it was originally based, and extricated itself from being chaired by such survivors of national-communism as Vasile Puşcaş. Cluj was privileged to mature as part of a partnership network that included mostly political science departments from American universities. Today, led by Vasile Boari, the department develops three directions of studies: political science, public administration, and journalism. Instruction is in Romanian, except for a journalism section in Hungarian. The political science faculty members come mostly from the faculties of history, law, and philosophy. The department offers undergraduate programs and an MA degree in post-communism and globalization. Since 1999, a new correspondence course program has inflated the number of students with about 100 units per year. These particular undergraduate students, usually already holding a BA and engaged in a professional career, do not physically attend courses and are supposed to get only writing credits.
[27] Finally, in 1996, the University of Iaşi created an MA curriculum in political science within the Department of Philosophy and Social Sciences; it was devoted mainly to political theory. Chaired by Anton Carpinschi, the program developed eventually also on the undergraduate level and is very active in promoting the advancement of the discipline in its Moldavian regional setting. Also, a small political science section was established in 1998 at the University of Oradea. The same year, a political science program started within the Department of Law and Public Administration at the Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, and a Department of Political Science and Communication was established at the West University of Timişoara. So far, these institutions have few faculty members and enroll a limited number of students.
[28] Several other departments that do not offer majors or degrees in political science claim a particular interest in this discipline. Three such cases are worth mention. First and foremost, the Chair of Politology, which is still operating within the Polytechnic University of Bucharest as a legacy of the chair of scientific socialism, which was on duty before 1989 as in all other Romanian universities. Indeed, scientific socialism, political economy, and, since the early 1980s, a fictitious discipline called "fundamental problems of the history of the Fatherland and of the Party" were mandatory courses in all institutions of higher education. Today, beginning undergraduates in technical sciences are still offered introductory courses in politics taught by instructors with teaching experience in Marxism-Leninism. Second, the Department of European Studies at the University of Cluj-Napoca offers its students a significant number of courses in political science, sometimes overlapping the Political Science Department’s mission and faculty. Third, the chair of moral and political philosophy of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Bucharest avows a stake in the study of politics, though it does not offer courses or seminars even remotely related to political science, except for a master’s degree program in public policies organized with the informal assistance of the National School of Political Studies and Public Administration. Four other would-be political science departments created within private universities should be added to the list, although they do not have an appropriate faculty of their own: Banatul University of Timişoara since Fall 1997, the Christian University Dimitrie Catemir of Bucharest, the Petre Andrei University of Iaşi, and the Bogdan Vodă University of Baia Mare and Cluj-Napoca since Fall 1998. A closer look at the Department of Political Science at the Bogdan Vodă University makes it a neat case study that immediately and succinctly tells the tale of how private Romanian institutions of higher education are working: its current dean and leading instructors are the former dean and the most distinguished members of the homologous department at the Babeş-Bolyai University. The same dialectics of change versus continuity seem to dictate the institutional alignments of research.
[29] Along with the National School of Political Studies and Public Administration, the Institute of Social Theory, attached to the Romanian Academy, is a leftover from the former Party Academy. Initially led by Radu Florian, a genuine and unreconstructed veteran of Marxism-Leninism, it was created in 1990 for the overt survivors of scientific socialism. Curiously enough, in only a decade, the Institute repeated the history of its institutional predecessor. In the early 1990s, the Institute represented the core of Romanian Neo-Marxism. After Florian’s death, the research team renewed not only its composition but also its interests, shifting from the intellectual left to a more nationalist vision. The Institute was thus tagged after Constantin Rădulescu-Motru, a pre-communist social thinker of extreme nationalist convictions. In December 2001, it was again renamed the Institute of Political Sciences and International Relations, and, ever since, the government has seemed willing to assume a direct share in its management.
[30] Facing this blatant expression of continuity, the University of Bucharest established in 1995 its own Center of Political Research, which became in 1999 the Institute for Political Research, acting also as the graduate school of the Department of Political Science. Two-year MA programs are available in the fields of political science, international relations, and public policies, and doctoral degrees are available in political science. As a research facility, the Institute fosters the broadest range of academic inquiries and debates in political science understood as an autonomous discipline, equipped with specific methods and approaches.
[31] Nor is that all. The Department of Political Science at the Babeş-Bolyai University created in 1997 its own Academic Center for Social Studies, which devotes considerable effort to empirical research, undertaken with a superior methodological thoroughness and published mostly by means of the electronic journal East-Political Science Review. Moreover, some of the activities of a couple of Institutes of the Romanian Academy in Bucharest come close to political science. The Institute of Sociology set up a research team to explore electoral campaigns and media response to political messages, while the Institute for the Study of Totalitarianism embarked upon an extensive study of such phenomena as the collectivization of agriculture and political repression under communism.
[32] The end of the Cold War and the extinction of communism, both as an ideology and as a practice of government, have not only made possible an unparalleled experiment in building a democratic order in Central and Eastern Europe, but have also opened up a most extraordinary intellectual opportunity: to understand and compare what had previously been neither understandable nor comparable. Political science was established in Romania amid the debris of scientific socialism in the realization that the problems and concerns of new and old democracies are beginning to converge. Ever since 1989, Romanian scholars in the field of social sciences, intellectual history, and political philosophy have been seeking to fulfill a long-frustrated desire by extending their teaching and research interest in political issues. The result is the emergence of a growing body of scholars permeated by a sense of critical engagement with European and American intellectual and political traditions that inspired the modern notions of democracy, pluralism, political liberty, individual freedom, and civil rights. For reasons to be explored hereafter, theirs is neither an unchallenged nor a mainstream endeavor.
[33] In the wake of the downfall of the communist monopoly over the interpretation of politics, three tendencies were immediately manifest. They should be understood against a background of complete methodological starvation, since before 1989 not only were Romanian social sciences, including history and legal studies, completely opaque to any form of correlation to Western theoretical and conceptual debates, but social scientists usually simply refrained from asking whether or not there is a method of scientific inquiry to underpin the methodological routine of their research.
[34] First, several researchers in history, philosophy, and law tried to piece together their academic experiences and join forces with junior scholars trained in political sciences or related fields at West European or North American universities in order to lay down a solid theoretical foundation for the emergence of political science. They could not depend on any indigenous tradition, since political science was not a discipline rooted in the pre-war Romanian academic heritage and had not even been smuggled as such into Romanian social sciences during the communist period. Their endeavor was soon to be fostered by the Department of Political Science and the Institute for Political Research at the University of Bucharest. Teaching and research are undertaken here in an eclectic theoretical framework that includes mainly historical approaches, neo-institutionalism, systems theory, and rational-choice theory. Those with this tendency are usually inclined to develop teaching methods and address topics that work out and ponder the respective merits of American formal analysis of politics, German critical theory, French political sociology, and Italian theoretical approaches. Their basic assumption is that such a balanced and manifold academic training, convergent with a plurality of political science research standards, will eventually yield an intellectual overspill effect when dispensed to several generations of graduate and undergraduate students. They withstand any form of pensée unique in political science that would mimic the late scientific socialism’s ambition to be the one and only canonical and officially approved science of politics. In addition, by themselves, the researchers affiliated with the Department of Political Science at the University of Bucharest (Daniel Barbu, the late Alexandru Duţu , Alexandra Ionescu, Filon Morar, Dan Pavel, Cristian Preda, Sorin Gabriel Sebe, Stelian Tănase, Laurenţiu Vlad, George Voicu) write more than 60% of Romania’s books and articles on political science.
[35] Associated with this tendency is the work of some sociologists who tried to develop a Romanian model for the study of social capital. Focused on transition, the contributions of Dumitru Sandu from the Department of Sociology of the University of Bucharest (Sandu, 1996, 1999) as well as the teamwork of a group of young scholars (Berevoiescu 1999) so far represent the paramount pieces of solid empirical research that involves political values and behavior.
[36] In fact, it might be alleged that the closer a political science department stands to sociology, the more developed its quantitative research. This general remark is particularly true for the Faculty of Political Science and Public Administrationof Cluj, which over time has demonstrated the steadiest commitment to the formal methods of political analysis, conducted by a well-structured research group run by Gabriel Bădescu (co-author in Rotariu, 1999). The University of Bucharest department harbors some highly theoretical formal research, due to its policy of recruiting both sociologists and mathematicians (Sebe, 2001).
[37] The survivors of the Party Political Academy largely embody the second trend, harbored by the National School of Political Studies and Public Administration and the Institute of Political Sciences and International Relations. Incidentally, the partition of the Party Academy into a research outfit and a teaching establishment is meaningful for the evolution of one communist network in a democratic environment. The less influential representatives of scientific socialism were assigned the "theoretical" mission of further promoting the nationalist ideology that underscored the last decade of totalitarianism. Meanwhile, the better-connected members of the network were given the more pragmatic task of taking over the market of political and civil service careers. They were soon joined by a number of junior scholars who are as wedded as their seniors to the heteronomy of politics, which they tend to understand exclusively in terms of public choice, government performance, and policies of development or the lack of them.
[38] A substantiating example of this unwillingness to attribute a theoretical identity to politics is offered by the books written by the leading instructors of the School (Pasti, 1995; Pasti, Miroiu, and Codiţă, 1997). Such books make practically no reference to the major findings and authors of political science, and they candidly ignore the rules and methods of scientific research and writing. It is no accident that they even fall behind the developmental ideology of the late 1960s and the early 1970s, driven as they are by a vernacular and somewhat unconscious Marxism, impurely connected to the clerical and sometimes resourceful Marxism of their predecessors. In this capacity, they represent what might be considered a drift that emulates a local tradition, as opposed to the radical tendency that does not acknowledge an overall Romanian intellectual legacy, but only appreciation of some individual achievements in the science of politics.