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By exploring the professional trajectory of sociologist Gheorghe (George) Retegan (1916–1998), this article addresses the epistemological and personal reconfigurations of the field of social sciences in post-war Romania, highlighting the complex relations and professional rivalries in the field after the Second World War, and their consequences for social knowledge. My study explores Retegan’s published and unpublished works, archival documents, and an interview that Z. Rostás conducted with Retegan in the 1990s. I analyse three research ventures relevant for understanding Retegan’s professional trajectory and methodological choices: the 1948–1950 family budget research that Retegan coordinated at the Central Institute for Statistics; the 1957–1959 monographic research he coordinated at the Institute for Economic Research; and his “farewell” to sociology and specialization in demography beginning in the 1960s. My article documents Retegan’s remarkable capacity to develop research by way of formulating new questions, methodologies, and techniques, on the basis of the main elements of empirical research he learned during his training in sociology under the supervision of Anton Golopenția. Retegan’s contributions to the field of empirical social research suggest how a context that was generally unfavourable for the development of social sciences (1948–1965) could be used in a creative way for the study of the social world. Epistemologically, the survival and even innovation of empirical research under unfavourable ideological and political conditions made possible the rehabilitation of sociology as a discipline in the much more favourable context of the second half of the 1960s.

By focusing on the emergence of the document "For a more just world", proposed by the Romanian delegation at the World Population Conference, Bucharest 1974, and adopted as its resolution, my presentation explores the relationship between the political realm and demographical sciences in defining the "population problem" at the beginning of the 1970s. I argue that the position Romania delegation professed at the WPC is the result of complex interactions between the pronatalist goals of the Communist regime and the international debate on the relationship between population and development from the beginning of the 1970s. The most important primary sources of my presentation are daily reports of the Romanian delegation, mainly identified in the Archive of the Romanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs- UN Problem Archival Fund, and edited proceedings of the WPC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the authors discusses the idea of making an exhibition on the theme of abortion in socialist Romania and the exhibition of the book "The Pro-Natalist Policy of the Ceaușescu Regime."

This article deals with the emergence of a new type of crime prevention in interwar Romania. Inspired by the Italian school of criminal law and by the Italian Criminal Code "Rocco" (1930), the Romanian Criminal Code "King Carol II" (1936) formulates a new type of criminal sanctions, explicitly designed to address and combat the social dangerousness. Regarded as a major challenge to the classic criminal system based on free will and guilt, the "security measures" were formalizing new types of offenders defined as such not by their criminal acts but by their criminal potential, redefining the scope and the goal of the criminal prevention. Major debates in the epoch reveal the possible threats this new type of criminal sanctions and of a criminal policy orientated towards risk prevention, seen as closely connected with authoritarian tendencies, carried for individual freedom and the rule of law. The legal issues discussed in the epoch prove significant for the current debates regarding the negative consequences the preventive War on Terror have for individual freedom and the rule of law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper proposes a Lacanian discourse analysis of 38 private letters addressed to Nicolae Ceausescu, the general secretary of the Romanian Communist Party (RCP), in 1968. Most of the authors of these letters, found in the National Archives of Romania, were inviting the agnostic, openly antireligious, general secretary of the RCP to participate to the baptism of their newborns, to be their godfather, and even to give his name, "Nicolae", to their children. I argue that these requests indicate the transformation of Ceausescu into the Symbolic Father of the newborn children, and by extension, of the future Romanian nation. Moreover, they show the citizens' renunciation of their parental functions on behalf of the state: their children are not theirs anymore, but become "children of the decree" (decreţei in Romanian), as the children born in Romania between 1967 and 1971 were commonly called. Ceausescu, the new "symbolic father", society's source of law and prohibition, is articulated at the most intimate structures of the citizens it governs, becoming "Nicolae", a Symbolic Father, source and custodian of the higher symbolic order of culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]