Mihai Eminescu. Institution-man. Precursor of the Bucharest Sociological School

Talking about Mihai Eminescu today may seem outdated, but it is not, because both the huge personalities and their work are timeless. Mircea Vulcănescu said that “Mihai Eminescu must be considered – without reservation – as the greatest sociologist of Romanians and of the Romanian phenomenon”290. He is an institution man because the radiography of Romanian society and the ways of “curing” the social plagues (such as the superimposed elite, the demagogic state, the semi-barbarbarization of society, etc.) that he identified are highly relevant today. Through compensation law and the theory of the negative selection of elites, Mihai Eminescu established the directions of research and public utility of Romanian sociology, which we will later find in the works of the Gusti School, in the law of sociological parallelism or social equilibrium, but also in the theory of cultural personality. Thus, the present material addresses a theme that we do not pretend to exhaust, namely the importance and topicality of Mihai Eminescu, as an institution man and precursor of the Bucharest Sociological School.