SOURCE: Badescu, Ilie. “Sociological Horizon.” Romanian Review 40, no. 1 (1986): 23-31.

In the following essay, Badescu asserts that Eminescu qualifies both as Romania's greatest poet and the founder of that country's “positive sociology.”

Reading the recently published volumes of journalism in the standard edition of Mihai Eminescu's Works one comes to the conclusion that the greatest Romanian poet is also the founder of “positive sociology” (as contrasted with the speculative sociological theories on society) in Romanian culture. The epistemological programme of the new science belongs in the great family of European scientific spirit. “We are not such as […] to rely in our argumentation on the dogmas of divine right, on historical figments, on the imagined shadow of previous states of things,” wrote Eminescu. Sons of the nineteenth century, we are only aiming in our researches at two things: to cite precise facts and to include them in a general formula...