The 1921 Agrarian Reform in Transylvania and its Reflection in the Considerations of the Members of the Bucharest School of Sociology

The 1921 agrarian reform aimed to be a significant step towards Romania’s agricultural development. The main motive of this reform – at least on a declarative level – was a socially oriented one: to expropriate a part of the big landowners’ estates, and to distribute in among the poverty-stricken people, with a special concern towards the First World War veterans, or their widows. At the same time, the agrarian reform recognised the differences in development between the different regions of the newly-formed Greater Romania, and as such there were two different laws regulating the reform processes in the Old Kingdom and in the newly annexed territories. The members of the Bucharest School of Sociology, based on the scarce data available to them to the time, approached the economically questionable results of this reform in a critical manner. József Venczel, who had acquired the bases of his professional knowledge at the same school, also proves, with regard to the Transylvanian land reform, that this had a second, national policy oriented goal, and its implementation was also ethnically biased