This article explores the connection between academic mobility, epistemological change, and generational belonging in state socialist Romania. Drawing on insights from intellectual history and recent literature on the use of generation as an analytical concept for the study of state socialism, it addresses academic mobility both as a generation-defining experience and a source of epistemological change. On the issue of generations, it reviews the types of academic mobility available and their roles in the careers of social scientists trained before 1945, in the early 1950s, and after the re-institutionalization of sociology in 1966. Across these three generations, this article analyzes how academic mobility was reflected in the knowledge produced on one theme in particular: quality of life. Empirical and theoretical research on quality of life in Romania was carried out under the umbrella of futurology (early 1970s), socialist modes of living/lifestyle studies (late 1970s–early 1980s), and finally demography and migration studies (1980s).

This article brings together the history of the social sciences and the history of social thought in Socialist Romania. It is concerned with the development of ideas about the social beyond collectivism, especially about the relationship between individual and society under socialism, from the early 1960s to the end of the 1970s. The analysis speaks to three major themes in the current historiography of Cold War social science. First, the article investigates the role of disciplinary specialization in the advancement of new ideas about the social in the postwar period. Specifically, it asks how the debate over the relationship between sociology and Marxism-Leninism has challenged ideas about collectivism from Stalinist social science. Second, the article shows how social practice, individual and collective agency, and people's subjectivities became theoretically relevant in the 1960s, and how they were integrated, via empirical sociological research, into the reworked conceptual apparatus of post-Stalinist Marxism-Leninism. This complicates accounts about the role of quantification and theorization in postwar social science by foregrounding the intense reflection on the role of empirical research in sociology under state socialism. Third, the article shows how the relationship between individual and society became a topic of interest across social sciences in the 1960s and 1970s. The Marxist humanist approach to the social, although it never achieved the institutional status of a distinct discipline, adds an important perspective from East Central Europe to the existing historiography of the ‘thinning’ of the social in social sciences and social thought beginning in the 1950s.

Abstract. In the beginning of April this year, the Hungarian Parliament passed two amendments to the existing educational law, which in their particular formulation targeted specifically the renowned Central European University in Budapest and sought to undermine the legal basis of its existence in Hungary. In four contributions leading academics and a PhD student of the History Department of the Central European University place the latest events in context, provide insights into the institutional set-up and the development of the History Department, and explain why this institution is special and worth fighting for.

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