It is interesting to see that American sociologists today are concerned of issues that had previously

concerned Romanian intellectuals in the 1920’s. Three major issues were debated: whether Romania
was able to pass from an agrarian based economy to a fully capitalized and industrialized economy,”are
open or closed strategies of economic development more suitable for developing countries?” and the
last which is now considered to be led important: if a developing country can be truly a democracy?
Some answers could be taken from the debate between two great Romanian intellectuals : Stefan
Zeletin, a neo-liberal defender of the ruling liberal party and Voinea a social demorcart. Zeletin’s
approach to the first issue was a Marxist interpretation, an uniformitarian evolution of the economy in
the developing countries, whereas Voinea was a partisan of Constantin Dobrogeanu Gherea’s view on
economy, an interpretation of Romanian history. Zeletin thought that a closed economy was more
suitable for a developing economy because it could be encouraged to produce its own goods, whereas
an open democracy would transform this type of economy into a colony of the Western developed
economies. Zeletin compared the backward Romanian economy to the early stages o the Enghish and
US economies of the 19th century. In order to pass this stages the economy had to stay closed. Other
drawbacks of open capitalist economy, in Zeletin’s view were the fact that the capital made in this part
of Eurpoe went into mire stable economies in the West, and that the technologies given by the West
were obsolete and the backward societies were used only for their cheap raw materials. The non-
uniformitarian theories were backed up by romantic writers such as Mihail Eminescu, and were saying
the fact that all modern interferences in the Romanian society were bad and that industrialization was
bad.Voinea believed that capitalism had inevitably invaded the Romanian economy, bringing the
peasants even more suffering than before. “I happen to think that Voinea and Ghere were right and
Zeletin was wrong. But that is not to say that Zeletin was foolish.” As for the final issue of democracy in
Romania or in other developing countries even modern day ones, Zeletin thought that it could only be
implemented by a capitalist oligarchy, whereas Voinea saw this oligarchy as being corrupt, and he was
wright. Zeletin would have been happy to see that his ideas would have been implemented in his own
country but not by the neo liberals after 1948! But for his neo liberal affiliations he would have surely
been celebrated by the communist regime.