Descriere
All throughout the decades following after the demise of communism, the reinterpretations of particular topics of Romanian history went together with a search for the re-conceptualization of the historical evolution of the country taken over the long run. Various layers of the process of change could be selected as privileged targets for the deployment of such an effort. The present book has to be seen as an instance of this collective search. It is premised on the conviction that any meaningful engagement with specific subjects involving the interplay between ideological patterns, social structures and public policies over the modern and contemporary periods of Romanian history can only have as a precondition the forging of an appropriate broad vision regarding the unfolding of basic political ideas from the beginning of modernization on the western model to the installation of the communist regime. Pursuing in his series of works investigations leading from general to ever more particular areas of research, the author has felt the need of recurrently coming back to the specific accents and conceptualizations laid down here, in order to elaborate further upon them without ever discarding the basic statements advanced. The second edition of the book is the result of this search for clarifying broad meanings behind historical details.
Victor Rizescu
***
Victor Rizescu, one of the most respected Romanian scholars in the field, highly appreciated for his contributions to the analysis and interpretation of modern Romania’s intellectual history, offers in this book a work of synthesis that, at the same time, opens up fresh insights on a series of important themes defining the process of modernization from a comparative perspective. The book is thus a contribution not only to those interested in Romania and Eastern European “area studies” but also to comparativists and all those involved in research centered on the conceptualizations of social structures and change from a historical perspective. Moreover, the book is highly relevant for the current debates on questions related to nation-states, national identities, globalization, and Europeanization processes, and the extrapolation of modernization trends in the post-modern world of the XXI century. It is indeed a book to be recommended not only to specialists but to the general public as well.
Paul Dragos Aligică,
George Mason University and University of Bucharest
Preface
All throughout the decades following after the demise of communism, the reinterpretations of particular topics of Romanian history went together with a search for the re-conceptualization of the historical evolution of the country taken over the long run. Various layers of the process of change could be selected as privileged targets for the deployment of such an effort. The present book has to be seen as an instance of this collective search. It is premised on the conviction that any meaningful engagement with specific subjects involving the interplay between ideological patterns, social structures and public policies over the modern and contemporary periods of Romanian history can only have as a precondition the forging of an appropriate broad vision regarding the unfolding of basic political ideas from the beginning of modernization on the western model to the installation of the communist regime.
Several other convictions are closely connected with this one. There is, first, the belief that contrasting the ideological landscape of Romania to that of the West can only be rewarding if associated with the enterprise of placing the former in an appropriate comparative perspective, within the setting of the East European region to which it belongs. Connected to this, there is the need of taking seriously the West-East lags of development when studying ideologies, in no less a fashion than in the case of focusing on any other compartment of the historical process. There further follows from this a demand for broadening the range of comparisons, such as to place Eastern Europe at large in relation to the global peripheries of the western civilization (the very historical identity of the region over the same modern centuries having to be defined as deriving from the role it has played as both the earliest of such peripheral areas and the closest to the West in terms of geographic proximity and cultural profile). There is, then, the view – elaborated at length in the introduction – that delineating the process by the means of which the bodies of thinking built around the defining patterns of liberalism, of the Left and of the Right have been transplanted from their western context of emergence into Romania has to be accompanied by disclosing the main contours of the critical sociology of modernization elaborated in the local milieu with a view to understanding the condition of a society suffering the impact of dramatic changes induced by outside influences. For sure, special compartments have to be devoted to the morphology of the national question, again with an effort of deepening the implications of the peripheral predicament in this particular area of historical growth. Three chapters are concerned with this question alone.
Pursuing in his series of works the kind of investigation defined above – leading, that is, from general to ever more particular areas of research – the author has felt the need of recurrently coming back to the specific accents and conceptualizations laid down here, in order to elaborate further upon them without ever discarding the basic statements advanced. The second edition of the book is the result of this search for clarifying broad meanings behind historical details.
