Essays on Romanian Intellectual History

Essays on Romanian Intellectual History includes some of the author's research on topics concerning the understanding of modern and contemporary history of Romania. The author uses interdisciplinary methods, hypotheses and theories concerning the evolution of the idea of nation, but also aspects that suggest re-thinking the national-European binomial. Being especially about Romanian culture, Victor Neumann placed the historian's discourse in relationship with the meaning attached to the identity phenomenon. The Romanian society is worth being understood through its legacies, perpetual values from one generation to another, and through its intellectual ideologies. Despite the talents and valuable works, the Romanian intellectual elite has not been concerned enough with the civic code, that is the public welfare and the norms of cohabitation specific to the modern world; it has not engaged in a dialogue with the mass of people and it has not managed to understand the middle class. The ideology incorporated in the affirmation of identity is unveiled through messages encompassed in key-concepts of the Romanian intellectual languages of the 19th and 20th centuries.