Browsing by Author "Pasti, Vladimir"

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Noul capitalism românesc
(Polirom, 2006) Pasti, Vladimir
In December 1989, for a plurality of reasons and in a special international conjuncture, Romanians overthrew the communist party from power, putting an end not only to an authoritarian political system, but also to the history of a form of social and economic organization, the communist one. Despite the fact that the Romanian revolution of 1989 was broadcast live on international television during the Christmas holidays, and enjoyed special attention from world public opinion, it was chronologically only one of the last such events to mark the end of political and socio-economic communism in Eastern Europe. 1989 can be considered the year of the victory of developed capitalism in Western Europe and North America in the "cold war" that lasted for almost half a century after the end of the Second World War. The confrontation between the Western world and the "socialist camp", which had been seeking an alternative civilization to capitalist civilization, ended with the political, economic and ideological-cultural victory of the West. The most important effect of this victory was the reorientation of the new, former communist societies towards a reconstruction of their own civilization. Recognizing not only their defeat, predominantly non-military, but also their inferiority to Western civilization, societies that had striven to build a communist civilization for over 7 decades in the case of Russia and over four decades in the case of its European satellites, made a huge turning point in their own history, opting politically for a complete social, economic and political reconstruction, that is, for the adoption of Western civilization.
Science and social knowledge or what we do not know about what we believe we know
(Universitatea Babes-Bolyai, 2023) Pasti, Vladimir
What is knowledge and how can we analyse it from within social sciences as social knowledge? Our socially driven intuition tells us that knowledge is a special relation that humans have with their surrounding world. Its specificity lies primarily in the fact that it implies a direct interaction with the environment. Another important and interesting characteristic of knowledge is its tendency to replace interactions with reality with interactions between pieces of knowledge produced about that specific reality. Connected to this, regarding the issue of truth, paraphrasing both Einstein and Smith, this article argues that ‘an invisible hand’ of the realities of social phenomena makes it so, that the accepted truths of a certain society are those and only those that are functional for the survival and reproduction of that society. And for this to happen it is a must that the elite designated with the production and the legitimation of ‘the truths’ exists and produces those ‘truths’ that support the ‘general interest’ of that respective society. Most importantly is to understand that the consistency of the legitimated truths with the dominant values of the society imbedded in its social order is far more important that their consistency with the empirical observations of the reality.