SOURCE: Badescu, Ilie. “Sociological Horizon.” Romanian Review 40, no. 1 (1986): 23-31.

[In the following essay, Badescu asserts that Eminescu qualifies both as Romania's greatest poet and the founder of that country's “positive sociology.”]

Reading the recently published volumes of journalism in the standard edition of Mihai Eminescu's Works one comes to the conclusion that the greatest Romanian poet is also the founder of “positive sociology” (as contrasted with the speculative sociological theories on society) in Romanian culture. The epistemological programme of the new science belongs in the great family of European scientific spirit. “We are not such as […] to rely in our argumentation on the dogmas of divine right, on historical figments, on the imagined shadow of previous states of things,” wrote Eminescu. Sons of the nineteenth century, we are only aiming in our researches at two things: to cite precise facts and to include them in a general formula.”¹

The three aspects of the traditional, anti-positive, un-scientific spirit, which, as we have seen, the poet rejects, had been imputed to him by some of his critics. Long exercised in the spirit of the new theoretical value, Eminescu succeeded in supplying one of the simplest and most accurate definitions of positive sociology, pointing out its specific character. “To cite precise facts and to include them in a general formula”—this is, no doubt, the essential feature of positive sociology. It appears as a theoretical value opposed to speculative sociology, which draws its essence from the speculative constructivism of our minds. Eminescu thinks that sociology can build its system on the unity of facts, discovering their “general formula.” This general formula is actually the law of social facts. “The great social phenomena will occur, we believe, in a causal order as necessary as the elemental events […]. It is not hatred that we can feel towards such an elemental event as the mass immigration of some ethnic element that has developed certain economic practices that we do not like […]² Hence, in studying the phenomena and finding their “general formula” (their law) one must not be influenced by idiosyncratic, affective, moralizing, but ineffective states of mind; it is none the less necessary to reveal, in the framework of a critical sociology, the negative tendencies, and to advance modes of action. At the basis of the programme for action put forward by Eminescu, with a view to ensuring the country's progress (the organization of agricultural work, the establishment and growth of a national industry, the introduction of new, compensatory relations between the “superposed classes” and the producer classes), lies positive sociology, in the spirit of which he examines the phenomena of parasitic exploitation, surplus-product drain, negative selection, predominance of the extrovert classes, etc. Investigation of these phenomena enabled Eminescu to detect the “general formula”, the law underlying them. Did he manage to provide the most general formula of the social facts in Romania's modern age, capable of revealing to us the structure of the Romanian social conditions and their deepest meaning. Did he point out the type of society that was being built in Romania in his time, and what distinguished it from other types? We think he did, and in the following we shall try to examine this side of his outlook.

As far as we can realize, Eminescu made equal use of the two approaches peculiar to nineteenth-century positive sociology: the comparative-historical analysis and the direct statistico-economic investigation of the contemporary situation. In Eminescu's sociological studies, historical and synchronic research were blended, using the whole range of techniques (professional monographs, reports, sociological monographs—such as A. V. Millo's The Peasant—demographic and economic statistics, time and income budgets, directly or indirectly recorded conversations, direct and indirect systematic observation, psychological diagnoses and descriptions, etc.).

Many of Eminescu's critics saw in the poet's comparative historical approach a proof of “love for the past.” For instance, conclusions alien to the spirit of Eminescu's sociology were forcibly drawn from an idea like this: “But this is the hotel [the country—I. B.] of professional patriots and of foreigners. The true country, the country of Matei Basarab, is poor and neglected.”³ To Eminescu, “the time of Prince Matei Basarab [the mid-seventeenth century—I. B.] is the time of a Romanian civilization and of a national society.”⁴ The population was growing, and there emerged a “standard language common to the entire Romanian nation […],” “a unity, ideal at least, of the outspread Romanian people …” favoured a return to the past. This is what the poet himself wrote: “… I have so often repeated that reaction in the true sense of the word, reaction as an attempted historical reconstruction of the pre-Phanariot age, is no longer possible in Romania, and we are not so Utopian as to ask for what God Himself could not do.”⁵

When Eminescu mentions the time of Matei Basarab's reign, he does this to point out the moment of rupture: with the Phanariot period, which practically covers the whole eighteenth century, the people was pushed into the Ottoman suburbia (“the morass of the Ottoman homestead”). There followed a second stage: the historic homeland was pushed into the condition of a “European suburbia.” As Eminescu sees them, these stages are, compared with the Matei Basarab moment, a very long step backwards. But he does not suggest a return to that moment; on the contrary, he theoretically calls, as “a child of the nineteenth century”, for citing precise facts and for including them in a general formula. While practically he proposes a “relation of compensation” between the “superposed classes” and the “positive class”, the producers of wealth. Contrasted with the time of Matei Basarab, when—as Eminescu thought—the Romanian people made its own history, acting as one agent in an organic social complex, the Phanariot period paved the way for an era of history controlled, through the “superposed class”, by the magnates of Western capitalism.

Eminescu sees in the voivode times a kind of pattern, a historic model of organic evolution. In his opinion, the events of 1848 were truly a change in our history, though not for an organic evolution but for the “Atlantic revolution”, i.e. a revolution made to fulfil the needs of the urban classes, of a Western-type bourgeoisie poorly represented in the Romanian Lands. This favoured the infiltration of a usurious, commercial bourgeoisie that later on pushed our society in an artificial direction of non-organic evolution.

In Eminescu's opinion, a proper, positively oriented reform programme should be placed in the “horizon” of the historical period when the Romanians made their own history. That was the voivodes’ period, and its use as a model for historically building a modern society was the essence of the concept of “adoptive era.”

Let us explain the terms. Developing Lucian Blaga's theory of “adoptive topics,” I. Em. Petrescu reveals the mechanism by which the spiritual model of an age, social group or even nation can push its roots into an “adoptive model,” which may be “in complete disagreement with the established model […] of the time.”⁶ Thus the adoptive model becomes a mode of approaching and “resolving” the problem facing the personality or the social group situated in the horizon of that model. In advancing the concept of “adoptive era” we are developing the thesis of Lucian Blaga, through the interpretation of I. Em. Petrescu, considering that Eminescu was fully aware of the possibility of placing the acts of cultural creation (including the political) in a deliberately chosen cultural horizon. This is the sense to be inferred from Eminescu's manner of orienting the political and cultural options of his time in the spirit and traditions of Matei Basarab's period. We think that Eminescu envisaged the possibility of fully crystallizing the general orientations of the “collective imaginary” (of the class having the power to impose reforms) in line with and in the direction required by values with a “modelling role” evolved in another period. This process of relating creative activities of the present to values evolved in another historical period is, essentially the mechanism which we have termed “adoptive age” and which is one of the factors acting in the tradition-innovation relationship.

Eminescu introduces in Romanian sociology the positive study of negative processes. He advances the term “semi-barbarism” to suggest that in the modern age the peoples of southeastern Europe had been pushed back into the dark past, into their condition of “exploited classes.” In this geographic area the social regimes build “socio-political” complexes for “draining” the surplus product, and articulated “economic modes”: above—the administration, turned into an economic mode of spoliation; below—agriculture, turned into an economic mode of enslavement, in the form of agricultural journeywork. Mihai Eminescu clearly notes the distinction—to be further investigated by his mind—between civilization and “semi-barbarism”, the two historical “species of society” arisen on the European scene. This distinction, drawn in the heat of a polemic with the Socialistically-minded brothers Nădejde, is the result of a great deal of historical and empirical research work. It shows that between the “rationalist (i.e. “artificial“, imposed from outside) organization” and the “more natural organization” resulting from an objective causality in the historical becoming of a society there is a significant. difference The latter type of organization seems to be peculiar to “civilization”, i.e. to the Western societies, whereas the former is characteristic of the Eastern societies. Eminescu rejects the idea (shared by the brothers Nădejde) that in itself “an organization based on capital” is “the cause of misery.” Capital begets exploitation, though not necessarily misery, in the form of a whole range of social degradation processes, all stemming from economic decay. In the West the organization based on capital did not result in economic decay. On the contrary, and then, says Eminescu, one must look for the real specific cause, that which generates first economic decay and later on in, close relation to it, moral, religious, cultural decay, and even biological degeneracy. “We think that the real cause of misery lies in quite another place [than in the organization based on capital and property, as the brothers Nădejde point out in their pamphlet—I. B.]; that it is inherent in the whole of liberal development started in the last century, that originates from the rationalist organization instead of the earlier, more natural, organization […]. There are here thousands upon thousands of people who in no way make good the work of the society supporting them, who […] draw from the nation, in virtue of their organization into an exploiting society, large sums of money as annual payments. The aristocratic needs of the ignorant plebs, of the liberal pleby—intellectually barren and morally decayed—this is what oppresses the people. This pressure could not be exerted by the inherited capital, nor by the capital earned by one's work, which, on the contrary, is constantly at the workers' disposal, or else would remain unproductive. If the Romanian socialists chose to look into the many budgetary forms—at the commune, country or national level—of squandering the very last penny, earned by the common man through his work, in order to feed the class of office-seekers and ordinary sycophants living on the general misery, with no compensation to their fellow man, then they would see for themselves that with us the evil is of a totally different nature. With us misery is produced artificially by introducing alien structures and laws, unsuited to the country's stage of economic development—a structure which is too expensive and produces nothing.”⁷

Therefore, by “organic evolution” Eminescu means that evolution which is based on the organic link between the people and the upper classes, i.e. on a relation of compensation, in which the people produce the wealth and the “upper” class produces the form of organization, the intelligence and culture required by a positive economic relation in which the profits exceed the costs. In Eminescu's view, the capital relation makes such a mode of social organization possible. But in South-Eastern Europe one has a negative “rational organization” based on a relation of “superposition” in which consumption exceeds output and the upper class promotes an “exploitation society” without any organic links to the real society and, hence, without a positive, compensatory economic relation. That is the reason why the analytic model for the “suburbia” must differ from the one peculiar to the metropolitan areas.

Yet regardless of the area, Eminescu firmly places civilizations and cultures in a relation of dependence on the economy. He writes: “Economists have noticed […] that the religious systems too, no matter how old and how deeply rooted in man's moral nature, will be altered, or even die out and be replaced by others after a moment of great economic decline, which is always accompanied or followed by great moral decline. We are far from praising the inferior condition of the peasant under the Réglement Organique [the basic law of the Danubian Principalities in 1830-1859—I. B.], far from wishing that the old state of things should return with its disadvantages. But as regards the normal, natural development of our nation, as regards the tolerable proportion between the hardships it endured and the welfare resulting as a benefit from those hardships, we should be blind, and unjust to our parents, if we did not see that that condition was far, far better for the lower classes than the present one. Far from us the intention of being laudatori temporis acti. The chief defect of the old organization lay in the fact that it did not take sufficient account of the middle class; but the peasant and the big landowner were both well-off […], being in perpetual contact […]. One could say that the old boyar was peasant-like, and the old peasant had a kind of boyar-like pride. But with the emigration abroad, with the introduction of foreign, expensive habits, with the absenteeism equally favoured by all our leading classes […], the old relation became altered (…). There is no longer any other distinction between people than that established by money, no matter how it is acquired …⁸

It is obvious, we think, that with Eminescu this is not a reactionary nostalgia for the past, but a certain view of the types of society: the “natural” (organic) and the “artificial” (limiting). In the natural societies a basic law is at work, namely the “law of the dynamic proportional” (which to Eminescu is a universal law). The essential defect of the old society was its failure “to take sufficient account of the middle class,” which prevented the effects of the law of the dynamic proportional from becoming fully realized. Another expression of this law is the positive economic relation between the “productive” and the “upper” classes, which necessarily entails “a tolerable proportion between the hardships endured by the people and the welfare resulting as a benefit from these hardships.” This would be a sign of progress in terms of material and moral civilization, for in Eminescu's opinion “economic decline is always accompanied or followed by a great moral decline.”

Using the comparative-historical method, Eminescu proves that immediately after the reign of Matei Basarab there began in the Romanian Lands an artificial-society era in which the action of the law of the dynamic proportional was blocked by the emergence of a negative economic ratio between the basic classes and the Phanariot “upper” class. The results of this were seen in a historical series of negative-sign processes. Eminescu's major contribution lies, however, in the positive examination of the second stage in the negative historical series, viz. the stage in which the Romanian nation was pushed into the surburbia of the West. His fundamental thesis is that, with the modern age, our gravitation axis was changed and we were pushed into the Western suburbia. The agent which effected this shift was, in Eminescu's opinion, the liberal system. It gave rise to a lumpenbourgeois oligarchy and enslaved the country to the Western capitalists (the Austrian included). In this context he deals with the question of railway building and of the Western and Central European notably Austrian influences. Eminescu's analysis is a contribution avant la lettre to a world accumulation theory with the definition of the place and role of the periphery, and he was the first to advance the theory of the “peripheral” space, the theory of the difference between the developed capitalist society and the “artificial” ones found on the outskirts of the West. Eminescu proves that the real cause of the decline was not capital but the superposed class with its system of negative relations with the people.

The capital relation makes it possible to have an organic relation between the classes, and also a positive economic relation based on the dynamic “proportional” production-welfare. The modern theories of world capital accumulation and the theory of unequal exchanges between the national economies support Eminescu rather than the brothers Nădejde. Actually, the metropolises have a direct proportion between the growth of the productive forces and the wage rate. This situation was analysed in depth by Karl Marx, and it lies at the basis of the law of the tendential decrease of the profit rate, (i. e., an inverse proportion between the growth of the productive forces and the profit rate), which once again shows that a progressive historical amount of profit was oriented towards internal development, towards growth and progress, rather than towards consumption. On the outskirts, however, as pointed out by Samir Amin,⁹ this law is ineffective; actually, between the growth of the productive forces (capital accumulation) and the wage rate there is an inversely proportional relation. Hence the organic link was broken under the systematic impact of a complex of factors. Eminescu works out the “artificial society” theory, revealing the negative historical relation established in such a society between the upper classes and the producing people, the latter being, to use a term from the theoreticians of “peripheral capitalism,” marginalized”, i. e., increasingly pushed out of civilization and exposed to the direct action of nature's laws—a higher death-rate, a shorter life-span, physical and mental degeneracy (hence, a deculturative process). The field reports used by Eminescu are highly illustrative in this respect. Above a certain limit, this law becomes destructive even to the system's reproduction as a minimal system. Thus, along with the decline of the population Eminescu finds a regression in the economic-productive potential, hence in the amount of society's productive forces. Therefore another aspect of the operation of the negative economic ratio, i.e., of the deviation from the metropolitan law of capital, is the fact that the “periphery” shows a tendency of progressive capital decrease, i.e., a progressive decapitalization, along with—paradoxically—a relative increase in the profit rate in favour of the “superposed class.” This is accounted for by the great exploitation of the people, by the lowering of their income level (hence a decrease in the “wage scale”) and the turning of the internal economy into a grain-exporting economy.

This process is tantamount to the shift of the country from the Ottoman suburbia into the Central European (German, Austrian, British and French capital). Thus Eminescu also places the cultural influences in their true light: they are not so much a rise in civilization as a mechanism for achieving negative historical relations.

Eminescu points out that the profits of the superposed class are due to the international economic mechanism, i. e., to the system of negative economic relations between the Central European and the national economies, the southeast European economies generally—a system into which Romania was being pushed by the play of purely political relationships.

Eminescu grasps the true face of political relations in the European-suburb system (an instrument of “dependent accumulation”, i. e., of enrichment of the extrovert superposed class and of draining the surplus product towards the metropolitan economies). Using the methods of positive sociology, he reveals the results of his own investigations, highly conclusive for the theory of the specifically Eastern cause of the people being pushed into a state of “semi-barbarism”: “I have known patriots […] who collected taxes on poultry from the peasants, taxes computed in money and translated into labour. I have known liberals who demanded the produce from four ewes for an ewe's grazing. Economically absurd, but such absurd pretensions took the form of money demands calculated on the basis of ridiculous prices (…). Thus the uneducated—though healthy and very intelligent—people became a prey to all those who could jot two words on paper and apply to them the provisions of a formal law copied from the civilized nations and suited to different needs, different people and different economic conditions.”¹⁰

In Central Europe (the case of Austria-Hungary and Germany) and in Western Europe (Britain, France), or in other historical societies (the Venetian Republic, the Roman Empire, etc.) there had emerged natural societies in which organic relations were established between the people and the upper classes, positive economic relations of compensation, and the principle of the “dynamic proportional” acted as a “natural” law of human history. In contrast to these global societal types, the South-East European society was “artificial”, with a superposed class, “orbital” (cosmopolitan) in its culture, non-historical in its forms (empty forms), negative in terms of its economic and moral civilization, etc. He describes, also comparatively, the organic, compensatory peasant-boyar relation, based on their cultural and national identity, as a type of social relation opposed, also strictly comparatively, to the type of artificial relation in which the two classes—the upper and the lower—are merely agglutinated, with no cultural, social, politico-juridical or any other contact. Decidedly, the contrast between the two forms of historical societies evolved on Romanian soil, the natural (in Matei Basarab's time) and the artificial (in Eminescu's own time) has a strictly comparative meaning.

Eminescu never rejects modern civilization out of hand; on the contrary, he acknowledges its presence as a historical civilization (and, hence, organic, based on a positive economy) in Central and North-Western Europe. He rejects, sociologically, not the society built on the civilization of capital (which he duly appreciates) but the type of artificial society built on super-exploitation of labour with no compensation in the structure and amount of capital. In the same sense he rejects, any theoretical attempt to apply to the Romanian Lands a “cosmopolitan and nihilistic pattern” where “the sentiments of country and nationality are trifles.” Eminescu's theory is one of “artificial societies” built on a “negative economy” and thrown into the suburbs of European history by extroverted superposed classes that push the nations into superexploitation with the aim of superconsumption and of enabling the surplus product to be drained by foreign companies. Eminescu points out that the condition of historical suburbia into which South-Eastern Europe was being pushed was determined by the tendency of equalizing the levels, and structure of consumption among the various economies, though not the levels and structure of output. Whereas in some geographic areas the levels of output and consumption rose simultaneously, in the Romanian Lands the superposed class equalized its consumption with that of the Western upper classes by reducing capital and pushing the people into misery, and by bringing the nation into a state of “dependence on foreign countries.”

Has there ever existed, in our area, a type of natural society capable of creating historical civilization? Yes, there has, says Eminescu: the historical society of the Romanians up to the Phanariot period. With the latter began the series of “negative history.” Only such societies can create civilization that rest on positive economic relations and obtain a “benefit” from the production-consumption relation. To make this possible, it is necessary to have a compensation relation between the classes, so that neither can consume something without supplying something else in return.

Notes

1. Article published by daily Timpul, May 20, 1881; cf. M. Eminescu, Opere (Works), Vol. 12, Publishing House of the Academy of the Socialist Republic of Romania, Bucharest, 1985, p. 179

2. Article published by daily Timpul, December 17, 1881; cf. loc. cit., p. 443

3. Article published by daily Timpul, May 20, 1881; loc. cit., p. 179

4. M. Eminescu, Opere (Works), Vol. 4, Ion Creţu edition, Cultura Românească Publishing House, Bucharest, 1938-1939, p. 188

5. Idem, p. 110

6. I. Em. Petrescu, Modele cosmologice şi viziunea poetică (Cosmologic Patterns and Poetic Vision), Minerva Publishing House, Bucharest, 1978, p. 14

7. M. Eminescu, Opere (Works), Vol. 12, Publishing House of the Academy of the Socialist Republic of Romania, Bucharest, 1985, p. 212

8. Articled published by daily Timpul, July 10, 1881; cf. M. Eminescu, Opere (Works), Vol. 12, Publishing House of the Academy of the Socialist Republic of Romania, Bucharest, 1985, p. 237

9. A. G. Franck, Samir Amin, L'accumulation dépendente, Editions Anthropos, Paris, 1975, pp. 181-185

10. Article published by daily Timpul, July 10, 1881; cf. M. Eminescu, Opere (Works), Vol. 12, Publishing House of the Academy of the Socialist Republic of Romania, Bucharest, 1985, p. 238