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Academic Bovarism and the Pursuit of Legitimacy: Canon-Building in Romanian Political Science

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Abstract

This article summarises a part of the findings of a larger explorative research that investigates the way in which various representations of national political science(s)/studies tradition and community are negotiated and transformed through interaction, with a focus on the impact of international mobility on political science canon-building. Through a case study on Romania and mostly discourse analysis tools, it examines in particular the competing discourses on (1) what is considered prestigious and scientifically desirable for a national political science community, and (2) what a national political science tradition should be about in relation with the rest of the scholarly world.

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Notes

  1. Historian Laurenţiu Vlad recently identified this previously unknown detail. A critical anastatic edition of this publication is currently being prepared by Laurenţiu Vlad and the author.

  2. Although Államtudományi currently translates most often as political science, I preferred ‘state sciences’ as an English-language equivalent to express better its intellectual closeness to the German tradition of Staatswissenschaft(en) for that particular period. I thank Lucian Nastasă-Kovacs and Zoltán Pálfy for discussions and clarifications on the nuances of the Hungarian-language terminology and curricular content at the Ferenc József University.

  3. Any selection of titles in this already vast scholarship is by default biased by personal preferences. A starting point for researchers interested in this topic can be the comprehensive Historical Bibliography of Romania, published periodically by the Romanian Academy.

  4. For teaching purposes, Romanian universities are usually organised in faculties and departments. Traditionally, a faculty (ro. ‘facultate’) is the expression of a full disciplinary delimitation, while the departmental level (ro.sg. ‘departament’, previously ‘catedră’) indicates specific research areas within a discipline. A faculty joining several disciplines and with discipline delimitation at the departmental level is a relatively rare and new phenomenon. For an international reader, familiar with US-inspired terminology, it may be perhaps easier to refer, in English, to a Romanian ‘facultate de ştiinţe politice’ in terms of a ‘department of political science’. However this may create confusion about the local organisational level of political science teaching. Therefore, in this paper, the Romanian distinction ‘facultate’/‘departament’ is maintained also in English, despite the alternative meanings that ‘faculty’ and ‘department’ have in English.

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Acknowledgements

For comments and suggestions on various versions of this study, I thank Simina Bădică, Thibaud Boncourt, Diego Checa Hidalgo, Florin Feşnic, Cristian Iacob, Ruxandra Ivan, Bob Reinalda, Eugen Stancu, Florin Ţurcanu, Cristian Vasile and Laurenţiu Vlad, as well as the participants to panels on political science as a discipline at the ECPR General Conference (2011) and IPSA World Congress (2012), the editors and two anonymous reviewers for this journal.

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  1. Department of Political Science, International Relations and Security Studies, University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania

    luciana alexandra ghica

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ghica, l. Academic Bovarism and the Pursuit of Legitimacy: Canon-Building in Romanian Political Science. Eur Polit Sci 13, 171–186 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/eps.2014.3

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