The Chicago Chair and the Romanian Question

He came to Chicago in 1956 and held the chair in the history of religions from 1957 until his death. What grew around him is usually called the Chicago school: a comparative, phenomenological approach that treated the sacred as a category not reducible to sociology or psychology, and that trained a generation of American scholars of religion. He founded the journal History of Religions and served as editor in chief of the sixteen-volume Encyclopedia of Religion, which appeared in 1987, the year after he died.

Criticism came from two directions. Historians objected that the morphological method removes phenomena from the societies that produced them and that the sources are used unevenly. Scholars of particular traditions objected that the generalisations do not survive contact with the specialist literature on any one of them.

The other criticism is biographical and it is not settled. In the 1930s Eliade was publicly sympathetic to the Legion of the Archangel Michael, the Romanian fascist movement, and wrote in its press; he served in the wartime Romanian diplomatic service; and after the war he did not discuss any of it. Documentation of the interwar articles has accumulated since the 1970s. What is argued about is not whether they exist but what they mean for the work, and positions range from treating the two as separable to reading the anti-historical strand of the theory as continuous with the politics. Anyone using his categories should know the argument is live.