Online ISSN 2286-0266
Print ISSN 1223-0685
© 2024 Œconomica by ASE & SOREC
 
Ştefan UNGUREAN
Universitatea "Transilvania" din Braşov
The present paper is an exercise to sociologically recover a story reported in a travel diary of a Western diplomat, who was passing through Moldova, at the end of the eighteenth century, where there are three characters belonging to three different cultures: a Moldovan, a Turkish and a French. At first sight, we could circumscribe the whole story in the framework of the Thomas theorem, the prophecy of creative self-realization, according to which “if a person perceives a situation as real, it is real in its consequences”. Therefore, the representation our behaviour stands on comes true, is being validated, by the consequences generated by our own behaviour. We can take a step forward and introduce the Foucauldian phrase, “power-knowledge”, and say that a power relationship generates the knowledge approaches and the knowledge content which provides the power to the enforcement tools. But the power produces in its governance action a philosophical-juridical individual (another Foucauldian phrase) who, in the manner he is constructed, supports the government. A world of violence gives birth to a traumatized individual. This traumatized individual supports the social practices and the way society works. Furthermore, the government rests on this traumatized man. This is the starting point in modernizing the Romanian society. Question: how much of this traumatized individual of the eighteenth century, of the way he is defined by the manner of adapting to the aggressiveness from his space or outside his space, has remained today? If we look at history from the perspective of continuity, saying that the traumatized man is still alive within us, it means we argue that we are “different”. If you believe that this philosophical-juridical individual is just a memory, that we don’t find ourselves in him, it means we argue that history, as real fact, is characterized by discontinuity. In this case, we should identify those fractures between the functioning’ conditions of society, on the one hand, and the government, on the other hand, from 1780 onwards, which have reshaped the matrix of the traumatized human.

ŒCONOMICA no. 2/2014
Keywords: autonomy, bios, natural law, positive law, subjective freedom, power of sovereignty, stress, trauma, nude life, violence, zoé
JEL: A14, D83, H11, Z13
Trauma versus Stress: An East-West Story from the End of the 18th Century [Traumă versus Stres: o poveste Est-Vest de la finele secolului al XVIII-lea]