As part of a bigger, innovative research project, Towards Good Society, the project on Romanian Economic Thought will help to highlight the need to critically reappraise the role of comparison in transnational history, by leaving methodological nationalism behind and taking a point of departure with economic concepts as part of wider networks of actors while still understand the role of the nation as a global space. The study of concepts will be connected with the political context, due to the fact that by creating normative horizons (sometimes contested and rarely stable) concepts should be connected to agency.

In order to understand Romania’s past and present especially in the European context an understanding of concepts is required, mostly due to the fact that many fundamental concepts are controversial in the Romanian milieu and this paves the way for many claims to legitimacy. Even if this study only covers the period from 1920s and 1940s, I also intend to add two concluding chapters which would open up the investigation on the following periods and maybe offer solutions to understanding Romanian mentalities today.

This study aims, by furthering this proposed assumption of convergence, to identify the actors and agency through which economic concepts have travelled in and out of the Romanian space, which thus to a certain degree be able to ascertain it (the convergence). In my opinion, it will be highly innovative by re-stressing the role of the economic in social imagination, re-connecting the East with the West and providing material and methods for future investigative work.

This sub-project is headed by Roxana Eugenia Breazu , PhD- researcher at Aarhus University.