Abstract
The period after the Great Union is characterized by an effervescence of Romanian cultural and scientific life. According to Dimitrie Gusti, solutions must now be found to restructure and modernize society, and this can be achieved through scientific knowledge and appropriate policies. The Arhiva pentru Știința și Reforma Socială (Archive for Social Science and Social Reform) was born in response to this appeal by the founder of Romanian sociology to Romania’s intellectual elite of the interwar period. The journal - published quarterly between 1919-1937, with a last issue published (after a 6-year break) in 1943 - had a broad profile, with studies in the fields of social sciences, linguistic research, natural sciences, exact sciences, applied sciences.
The studies on the peasants published in the Archive represented broad incursions into the rural society of that period and made a significant contribution to Romanian rural sociology, through their multidisciplinary and complex approach to the social units and phenomena studied. The Arhiva journal would represent the most important publication in the field of social sciences during the inter-war period in Romania and would be until 1936 - the year of the appearance of the Romanian Sociology journal - the exclusive host of monographs’ studies.
The present study aims to analyze the sociological studies published in the Archive for Social Science and Social Reform (1919-1943) that approach peasantry, its social tendencies, its involvement in political and social life.