Sociologist Virgiliu Constantinescu launched on Wednesday, at Gaudeamus Book Fair, his work "Treatise on Sociology of Rural Communities", published by the Publishing House of the "Romania de Maine" Foundation, on which occasion he raised an alarm in regarding the crisis of the Romanian village and pleaded for the recovery of the "lost eternity" of the Romanian village.
Two volumes totaling 760 pages, the result of over 60 years of work in the department, in the library and in the field, the work is, according to the author, "a living book", agerpres reports.
"It is the book of my life as a professor, researcher and person who achieved this integration of education with research and social practice. (...) We were concerned with the training of sociologists, but not greenhouse sociologists, because rural sociology is not done over coffee and not in an office, but down there. We have the tradition of Ion Ionescu from Brad who did research walking, step by step. Rural sociology must be realized by living with the peasant, with the man from the rural environment, not coming from outside it," Professor Virgiliu Constantinescu declared for AGERPRES.
"We were talking about the recovery of the lost eternity. We should call the 'people at the top' [the authorities] so that an experience gained since the 19th century is not lost. We had great sociologists, not only Dimitrie Gusti, starting with Spiru Haret, who was, in fact, the founder of cooperative activism in Romania. Then there were the representatives of Romanian neoliberalism, who had a completely different vision on the world map and among whom great personalities such as Mihail Manoilescu appeared," said Virgiliu Constantinescu.
Professor Constantinescu believes that "at the moment we are experiencing a village crisis".
"At the moment we are experiencing a total crisis, a system crisis, a crisis of the village. What is the village? It is no more. This is it. The lost eternity. Even without an official support we should not expect that the exodus will end, that someone will return 'to the field', as Manoilescu used to say, or someone will come and implement a new village. This is where this book finds its purpose," concluded Professor Virgiliu Constantinescu.