Collective actors(1850-1918)

In the case of the Romanians from 19th century Transylvania, the history of elite plays a major part in understanding their relatively accelerated evolution from a mainly rural people with a subservient status to the semi-bourgeois and politically-educated nation of the 1900s. This project maintains that a group-level (or `subset level`) analysis of the Romanian elite from Transylvania between 1850 and 1918 is not only possible but also necessary. Some of these groups were previously identified in historiography at an empirical level, and were named after: their centre of gathering (the group around the `Albina` bank, the one around the Greek-Catholic Metropolitan See of Blaj), their leader (the `Șaguna` or `Rațiu` factions), their professional structure (`the group of the 7-8 clerks`) or their attitude (passivists, activists, tribunists, `steel-hard young men`). The finality of the project is two folded: on the one hand, it will provide better knowledge of these gregarious elite structures; on the other hand, the applicability of the pluralist theories in the research of the Romanian elites will be tested, hopefully generating a methodological framework for future approaches.