While Malinowski was catalysing disciplinary change in the Western Pacific, his co-national Florian Znaniecki was transforming sociology in the American Midwest. By war’s end Znaniecki had co-authored the Chicago school of sociology’s seminal work, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (with William I. Thomas, 1918–20).Footnote 4 Unlike Malinowski Znaniecki then returned to Poland, establishing sociology as a recognised discipline in the new state. While the Sociology Institute in Poznań served as an engine of transatlantic exchange throughout the 1920s and 1930s, sociological concepts also made it possible to imagine Polish society in a global context. Suddenly, it seemed just as plausible to consider Warsaw in relation to New York or Chicago as to Prague, Budapest or Zagreb.
Malinowski’s creative appropriation of his liminal status, on the one hand, and Znaniecki’s assertion of East European and North American commensurability, on the other, point to the new era of epistemic experimentation that is the subject of this special issue, and that accompanied political reconfigurations of the non-Western world beginning in the late nineteenth century. The disproportionate role of scholars from Central/Eastern/Southeastern Europe in twentieth-century social science has been oft noted but little explained. We propose that the geopolitical shift from a world of empires to one of nation states, which started in the Balkans and East Central Europe, and continued later in dependent and colonial territories, recharged social science as a field of potential innovation and transformation. As millions in the region changed their places of residence and/or citizenship, the quest to reinvent knowledge about what binds people and what divides them, what is close by and what is distant, what is backward and what is modern, what is a part and what is the whole, was particularly rich and historically momentous.
The modern social and human sciences played a pivotal role in this process, and, as this issue argues, East Central and Southeastern Europe served as a key locality from which to view the world through new epistemological lenses.Footnote 5 Historians of science typically use the term ‘locality’ to denote a site of contact and circulation between local and cosmopolitan epistemic cultures; here we also wish to suggest a conceptual space that, while ostensibly identified with a particular geographical area, allowed social scientists to project particular scientific problems onto a universal plane. In taking this approach, the issue points to fundamental questions about how regions deemed ‘peripheral’ participate in the production of global scholarly knowledge.Footnote 6 The entangled transnational practices it describes suggest that the history of modern social science can and should be narrated beyond canons, geopolitical hierarchies and centre–periphery frameworks; this history can, indeed, be told from any place where people have reimagined their relationship to a shared global modernity.Footnote 7
After Versailles the new nation states in this part of Europe were both the subjects and objects of knowledge production. On the one hand, they became a testing ground for various ideologies and technologies of scientific engineering originating in Western Europe, the United States and/or the Soviet Union. These interventions heavily influenced processes of state building in the region and were later used as models for developmental politics in other parts of the world.Footnote 8 On the other hand, scholars in and from the region actively contributed to new social scientific concepts and systems, constructing a global imaginary in which to position themselves following the collapse of the continental European empires.Footnote 9 Crucial to these political and epistemic reinventions was the making of a new scalar imagination, which Deborah Coen aptly describes as a process of ‘situating the known world in relation to times or places that are distant or otherwise inaccessible to direct experience’.Footnote 10
The region’s historic liminality as a putative bridge between ‘Occident’ and ‘Orient’ profoundly shaped these processes.Footnote 11 The creation of East Central and Southeastern Europe as a distinct geopolitical entity after Versailles only heightened the paradoxes of liminality, literally inscribing its ‘betweenness’ in territorial arrangements of a cordon sanitaire between Soviet Russia and the West.Footnote 12 Although deemed worthy of ‘national self-determination’, the new peoples of Europe commanded an ambiguous status vis-à-vis Europe’s great colonial powers, who so conspicuously denied these rights to their own imperial subjects. Experts, meanwhile, grouped the region with Asia and Africa as one of the world’s impoverished agrarian zones, while travellers, including some Western social scientists, came as they had since early modern times to marvel at this more savage, unspoiled and authentic ‘other’ Europe.Footnote 13
For scholars from this part of Europe the result was a quest for self-knowledge in which ‘betweenness’ functioned not just as an other imposed optic but also as an epistemic resource for positioning the region on the map of human and social science. Social science, with its pursuit of universal scales and categories of comparison, became particularly fertile ground for such endeavours. As the essays here show, some scholars parlayed the region’s ambiguous position on an imagined civilisational and developmental gradient into ambitious methodological and theoretical agendas linking ‘West’ and ‘East’, ‘civilised’ and ‘savage’ or ‘first’ and ‘third’ worlds. Others, echoing scholars of the Habsburg Monarchy, projected the region as a ‘globe in miniature’ ideal for testing and developing new world-scale concepts and categories.Footnote 14 For others, tensions between the universalities of race and civilisation and the specificities of geography, history and culture prompted the search for new epistemological foundations for social science as a whole.
It bears emphasising that the social scientists considered here took the ‘social’ in ‘social science’ seriously. In this respect this issue diverges from a small but growing literature on social science in interwar East Central and Southeastern Europe that foregrounds the instrumentalisation of expert knowledge by states and international organisations and the turn to scientistic paradigms such as race.Footnote 15 Instead, we focus on social scientists’ roles in wide-ranging debates, at both the national and transnational levels, over the meaning of concepts like nationality, religion, rurality or class. This was a search to define the ‘social’ itself – and also, in many cases, to identify the conditions for its emancipation. By contrast to the generally liberal emigré social scientists whose work is better known in the West, a number of these scholars held left-wing commitments to socialism, agrarian populism or Marxism. As the milieux in which these debates took place were ravaged by the Second World War and Stalinisation, and positivist and scientistic models came to dominate global social science, these debates themselves were often lost to historical view.
In a region and period marked by dramatic ruptures and discontinuities, biography can be a particularly useful tool for uncovering scientific histories against the grain. The articles here therefore present a number of fascinating and under-explored intellectual biographies in the fields of economics, statistics, sociology, social medicine and psychiatry. In bringing to light the personal dimensions of scientific exchange and innovation, they show how transnational intellectual entanglements worked in practice between Warsaw and Paris, Kraków and New York, Polesie and Jamaica or Belgrade and Conakry. Focusing, moreover, not just on successes but on ‘dead ends’ and paths not taken, they offer clues to the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion that continue to shape histories of the field.
If this issue takes one geopolitical reconfiguration as its starting point, another brings it to a close. The Second World War and the Cold War were unparalleled catastrophes for the academics of East Central and Southeastern Europe. Those lucky enough to survive war and genocide into the post-war era found, at best, their scholarly networks crudely bisected by the Iron Curtain. And yet it was at this moment, marked by the universal extension of the principle of self-determination and the birth of a new ‘era of development’, that many of their social scientific innovations – sometimes under the guise of state socialism – finally ‘went global’. The last part of the issue therefore carries us forward into the post-war period, considering some of the ambiguous afterlives of figures and ideas incubated in the age of Versailles, ‘little dictators’ and global economic crisis.
‘Making Modern Social Science’ deals with scholars who, in the first half of the twentieth century, used the heterogeneity of social life in their region as a template for conceptualising the world and their countries’ place within a global framework. With this in mind, the issue’s first two essays shed light on the regional origins of a spatial imagination in economics and statistics. Quinn Slobodian indicates in his contribution that practices of ‘scaling up’ local circumstances in Central and Eastern Europe to the global level were already present in the Habsburg empire. Slobodian looks at Lviv-born, Vienna-educated Ludwig von Mises, who used an imaginary Austro-Hungary – with its internal division of labour and allegedly harmonious liberal economic order – as a reference for his (neo)liberalism.
‘World scale’ remained an important device of political and scholarly claim making after the collapse of the Central and Eastern European empires. Małgorzata Mazurek deals with Ludwik Landau’s World Economy, a reaction to the liberal orthodoxy of the 1920s and early 1930s, and in particular, to statistical practices that neglected rural and colonial world regions. Landau’s radical revision of international statistics by means of a highly original Marxist approach represented Poland (and more broadly, Southern and Eastern Europe) as a geo-economic unit that shared features of both the Western and non-Western worlds. Landau thereby challenged well-established claims about the statistical incommensurability of ‘civilised’, ‘colonial’ and/or non-industrialised territories, introducing universal scale into the field of international statistics.
The next two essays focus on the transnational circulation of two key social scientific paradigms of the early twentieth century – those of Émile Durkheim and Bronisław Malinowski, respectively – within and beyond East Central Europe. In an era of sudden social dislocation, Durkheim and Malinowski proposed universal methods for the study of world societies. Joanna Wawrzyniak, writing on the only non-French member of the Durkheimian inner circle, the Pole Stefan Czarnowski, highlights how the central Durkheimian question of the mechanisms of social integration found its East Central European subtext with regard to nation and labour. After publishing a first monograph in Paris on the role of religion, heroes and the reinvented past in nation building, Czarnowski returned to Poland where, confronting local manifestations of the global political and economic crisis in the 1930s, he formulated a labour centred, comparative historical sociology of culture and developed cases studies on the European working class, the Polish peasantry and colonial Central Africa. In addition, Wawrzyniak points us beyond assumptions of the unidirectional transfer of ideas from metropole to periphery, showing how entanglements such as Czarnowski’s influence on James Joyce have remained invisible in European intellectual history.
Katherine Lebow’s contribution points to East Central Europe as a locality ‘on the move’, following the intersecting paths of two of Bronisław Malinowski’s Polish protégés, Feliks Gross and Józef Obrębski, into New World exile after the Second World War. Lebow describes a methodology and body of knowledge with a transcontinental trajectory and famous pedigree that nonetheless ended up at the margins of Cold War science. In their research on rural Jamaica or the Arapaho reservation, Obrębski and Gross saw a chance to ‘go global’ with pre-war Polish intellectual agendas, including what Obrębski, in response to decolonisation, called the ‘sociology of rising nations’. US social science, however, was not receptive to methods and ideas prefiguring post-colonial and constructivist trends that would emerge only a generation later.
The issue’s last three articles present three crucial and specific aspects of regional social knowledge in global entanglements: rurality, social medicine and psychiatry. Raluca Muşat describes how Dimitrie Gusti successfully established rural sociology as the Romanian ‘national science’, positioning it within the rising field of international peasant studies and transforming it into a powerful, internationally recognised scholarly enterprise before it fell into oblivion under communism. Muşat shows that Romanian rural sociology found wide resonance among Western liberals and international experts, meeting a growing demand for expert knowledge about poor rural populations. Gusti was among several regional scholars who successfully contributed to the development of transcontinental expertise about rural life in the non-Western world during the pioneering years of international development.
Sara Silverstein shows how, like Gusti, the Yugoslav scholar Andrija Štampar introduced ideas about rural hygiene and social medicine to an international audience. With the backing of the Rockefeller Foundation and the League of Nations, Štampar successfully developed and implemented projects which were initially aimed at ‘backward’ agrarian communities in the Balkans, China and Latin America. The story of Štampar’s initiatives, according to Silverstein, complicates historiographical narratives equating interwar ideas of social medicine with eugenics and social control.
Finally, Ana Antic offers us a glimpse of a post-war encounter between the so-called ‘second’ and ‘third’ worlds. Showing how post-colonial Guinea became a testing ground for Yugoslav psychiatrists combining lessons from interwar and wartime Europe, Marxism and Yugoslav theories of the ‘revolutionary self’, Antic’s study recapitulates many problems and themes raised in the issue’s other contributions. The outcome of this encounter – an anti-colonial psychiatry that preserved some assumptions of European colonial knowledge – sheds new light on the history of European social science in a post-colonial setting.
To conclude, this issue attempts to contextualise a key moment in intellectual history with regard to the historical experiences of a particular time and place. More broadly, by considering East Central and Southeastern Europe as a node in the creation, translation and transformation of global social scientific knowledge, it addresses the transnational circulation of people and ideas, revisits the stakes and stakeholders in key social scientific methodological and epistemological debates and explores dead ends, paths not taken and repressed or forgotten disciplinary histories. It seeks to destabilise scientific dichotomies of East and West, North and South, coloniser and colonised, European and Other. Given our current scepticism toward social scientific claims of universal truth, this seems a timely endeavour; as the essays here remind us, the social sciences have always been part of the very ‘processes of innovation and structuration’ they claim to illuminate.Footnote 16 And yet for this same reason, we should neither caricature nor underestimate the attraction of social science for so many intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth century nor their efforts to use it both to understand the world and to change it.
