Dimitrie Gusti

Dimitrie Gusti (1880 to 1955) was a Romanian sociologist, ethnologist, historian and voluntarist philosopher, a professor at the University of Iași and the University of Bucharest, and the main contributor to the creation of a new Romanian school of sociology. Born in Iași, he studied in Berlin and Leipzig and completed a doctorate in philosophy in 1904. He was appointed to the University of Iași in 1910 and moved to Bucharest in 1920, where he created the Bucharest School of Sociology and several institutes and attracted students of very different political convictions. Between 1925 and 1948 he led intensive research on Romanian villages and the publication of the results as detailed monographs, assisted by Gheorghe Vlădescu-Răcoasa and Henri H. Stahl. In 1936 he created the Village Museum in Bucharest with Stahl and Victor Ion Popa, and it now bears his name. A prominent member of the Peasants' Party and then the National Peasants' Party, he was Minister of Public Instruction in 1932 and 1933, was elected to the Romanian Academy in 1919 and was its president from 1944 to 1946.