First noted as a favorite disciple of Dimitrie Gusti, he helped establish the Romanian school of rural sociology in the 1920s and early 1930s, and took part in interdisciplinary study groups and field trips.

A leading functionary and ideologue of the fascist National Legionary State, and a figure of cultural and political importance under dictator Ion Antonescu, he proposed the compulsory sterilization of "inferior races", and wrote praises of Nazi racial policy.

[5] These years coincided with World War I and the recognition of Transylvania's union with Romania: Herseni began his secondary education in a Hungarian-speaking regimen,[6] and passed his baccalaureate examination in 1924, as a Romanian national.

[19] Also that year, having lectured for a while at Sabin Manuilă's School of Social Work,[6] Herseni was appointed by Gusti's an assistant professor in the University of Bucharest department of sociology, ethics and politics.

"[4] Stahl recalls that only Herseni could match his teacher's "surprisingly vast erudition" and "systematization" of received knowledge; he was also among the more loyal of Gusti's gifted disciples, effectively replacing Petre Andrei, who had spoken out against the ISR.

In addition to Societatea de Mâine, Gând Românesc, and the ISR's Arhiva pentru Știință și Reformă Socială and Sociologie Românească, these include Familia, Tribuna, Revista Fundațiilor Regale, Independența Economică, and Semne.

[41] Falling more in line with the Societatea de Mâine group, and influenced by physician Iuliu Moldovan, Herseni became a visible supporter of eugenics and biopolitics, introducing eugenicist language to works he wrote alongside Gusti.

[47] By 1935, Herseni had also come to sympathize with a fascist dissidence which divided the Gustian movement: although attacked by Ernest Bernea in Rânduiala magazine, which spoke for this counter-current, he parted ways with Stahl over political stances.

[48] At the time, moderate left-wingers such as Stahl and Golopenția, witnessing the internecine conflicts between the Guardist supporters and the radical-left group headed by Gheorghe Vlădescu-Răcoasa, began equating Herseni's politics with an egotistic social climbing.

As noted by historian Adrian Cioflâncă, Herseni's credo had "great similarities with communist discourse", endorsing nationalization, a minimum wage, and social insurance, and a "work-based hierarchy" throughout society.

[71] In January 1940, Herseni was still affiliated with the Carlist regime, overseeing the creation of a state-sponsored National Students' Front;[72] at the time, his wife was working as a schoolteacher in Petru Rareș, south of Bucharest.

[73] The looming threat of war and Romania's rapprochement with Nazi Germany sent the Gusti school into its final crisis: in summer 1940, Stahl was drafted and sent to work on the "futile" task of building up defenses; Herseni helped him obtain his Ph.D., intervening with the university leadership.

[84] Crediting "the genius of Adolf Hitler" as in inspiration, he proposed the compulsory sterilization of "inferior races", specifically the Jews, Romanies and Greeks, "as a tribute to beauty, to morality, and in general to perfection.

[89] Scholar M. Benjamin Thorne also notes that, among Iron Guard figures, Herseni and Liviu Stan stood out for their Romaphobia; their identification of the Romanies as racial enemies had no precedent in Guardist discourse.

[93] By the close of 1940, Herseni and Făcăoaru were co-opted by Rector Panaitescu on the university review commission, whose mission was to purge academia of undesirables in general, and in particular of former National Renaissance Front dignitaries.

As argued by historian Constantin Prangati, this also made him part of a clandestine intellectual network which "supported national culture, defending the Romanians' language and history, while maintaining faith in the arrival of better times"; other members were Giurescu, Iorgu Iordan, Simion Mehedinți, and Dan Simonescu.

The changing political climate allowed anthropologists "to reposition autochthonous ideas within their discipline"; Herseni, "an important Legionary sociologist", "provides an exemplary case of post-war re-adaptation, professionally and theoretically.

[129] Turda traces the links between the fascist ideologist and the communist anthropologist: "Although the general topic Herseni reflected on was genetic genealogies, his main argument focused on the importance of ethnic anthropology in connecting forms of the nation's micro and macro physical development over time.

[41][136] This praise of collectivism and economic incentives under the socialist mode of production was reviewed with skepticism by the Romanian exile psychologist Edgar Krau, who notes that Ralea and "Hariton" had failed to even mention "the all-pervading [communist] party tuition" as a possible disturbance of data.

In early 1963, the propaganda magazine Glasul Patriei was scheduled to reemerge as a venue for reformed and reeducated Iron Guardists; Herseni was reportedly assigned to work on an essay called O eroare fundamentală: concepția legionară despre muncitorime și țărănime ("A Fundamental Error: The Legionary Take on Workers and Peasants").

[138] After 1965, when he entered a new period of prolific writing,[144] Herseni sought to accumulate direct knowledge in the field of industrial sociology, reviving and adapting Gusti's (and his own) interwar methodology: a monographic "problem-centered" technique, and a focus on interdisciplinarity.

[148] Such claims were disputed in the official Marxist journal, Lupta de Clasă, by A. Crișan, who noted: "Traian Herseni has the merit of having made great progress these past years, when it comes to assuming a scientific position in philosophy and sociology.

[154] As a columnist and sociological analyst in Familia, he chronicled books by Pierre Francastel, Herbert Read, Jean Piaget, Talcott Parsons, and T. R. Fyvel, as well as reintroducing his public to works by Gusti, Virgil Bărbat, Alexandru Claudian, and Ștefan Zeletin.

[145] The result was a study in "concrete social psychology", the 1969 Industrializare și urbanizare,[145] which, according to sociologist Irina Tomescu-Dubrow, samples the "valuable work" produced in urban sociology under communism.

[76]During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Herseni diversified his contribution, with a chapter in the pastoralist sociology treatise of Franz Ronneberger and Gerhardt Teich (1971) and an essay introducing the work of psychologist Nicolae Vaschide (1975).

[168] Inspired by Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Constantin Noica, Mircea Eliade, Ruth Benedict, and James George Frazer, Herseni described language and early poetry as interconnected with folk religion, and especially with magic.

[170] As noted in 2008 by scholar Eugen Negrici, such writings are also intertwined with the official dogmas of national communism: "still haunted by his old fears, [Herseni] tried to look his best in front of the communist authorities, providing his sociological perspective—one saturated with Marxist cliches—on Romanian literature".

[175] During the early 1970s, in essays he wrote for Constantinescu's Sociologia Militans archive, Herseni explained his intention of transcending rural sociology, applying its lessons to understanding (or generating) social actions in the national sphere, and, beyond, in geopolitics.

[179] Parts of the work recorded the localization of Christmas, including the "dilution" of an older pagan holiday,[180] or posited that, in the folk psyche, the Virgin Mary had replaced Bendis;[181] in the ancient ballad Miorița, he identified an opposition between patriarchy and matriarchy, as embodied, respectively, by the Sun and Moon.

According to Negrici, the book shows Herseni as a convert to protochronism, the communist doctrine (blended with "the undigested residues of the interwar right")[121] which supposed Romanian cultural superiority and ancient pedigree.