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Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea might have become an internationally famous socialist thinker and/or one of the founding fathers of the sociology of knowledge. He became neither, and this was largely due to his having settled in a country where socialism was regarded as a "foreign plant" and where his Jewish origins were a serious hindrance, of which he was keenly aware. Advocating assimilation, Gherea was not a Zionist. Advocating gradual socio-economic development, he was suspicious of Leninist voluntarism. There is a striking resemblance between Gherea and "young Karl Marx", to whose writings he is unlikely to have had access. His perceptions of the role intellectuals play in society place him along such later figures as Antonio Gramsci, Karl Mannheim or Roberto Michels.
In May 1990, some six months after the toppling of the Communist regime in Romania, I paid a first visit to Bucharest, the town where I was born. In the twenty-nine years that had passed since I had emigrated from the country, a lot had certainly changed, and as far as I could tell, nothing had changed for the better. The city had doubled in size, and I would have been certainly lost in any of the new typical communist neighborhoods that had sprung up like mushrooms after rain and, just like them, looked exactly the same: some larger, some smaller, and all full of mud. The city-center, on the other hand, looked quite familiar, but triggered in me a strange, oneiric feeling: I knew I had been there before, but faces were different; I understood the language people were using, yet pronunciation seemed to have changed and linguistic violence somehow lingered in the air. The buildings around the seat of the Central Committee of the former Romanian Communist Party (PCR) were bearing the scars of the still-unclarified events that followed the flight from the Central Committee roof of communist dictator Nicolae Ceaus escu, executed after a sham-trial on 25 December 1989, three-days after his ignoble departure. The shooting had been attributed to "terrorists" faithful to the former PCR leader, but, strangely enough, the Central Committee building, where the new leadership had gathered, was nearly untouched. Right across, at the corner of what was now called Revolution Square and the Dem I. Dobrescu...