Measuring Time, Debating Individuals and Taking Distances: Approaching Modernity in Romanian Political Thought
Measuring Time, Debating Individuals and Taking Distances: Approaching Modernity in Romanian Political Thought

Summary/Abstract: Studying Romanian political modernity implies mobilizing a heteroclite corpus of various sources demanding a transdisciplinary approach that political science has been dealing with in both the continental and Anglo-Saxon traditions. This approach took time to breach the traditional research methods in Romanian social sciences, which is precisely why the study of Romanian political modernity should remain one of the main focuses in unveiling and retracing political modernity. The methodological approach of this article targets political modernity as a crossroad between modernization and democracy, analyzed from the point of view of conceptual history and of several related disciplines combined. For the last two decades, there was an ongoing effort to address a relevant corpus of texts claimed otherwise by historians. The study focuses on the Romanian political modernity in its making, through the nineteenth century, built discursively in an always problematic relationship with the past. The conceptual instrumentation of the modern political identity evolves with the perception of a political and historical time, in a consubstantial narrative making its way through “History,” “Homeland,” “Patriotism,” and “Democracy.” The present article aims to bring into discussion these ambivalent discursive attitudes, and to interrogate the possible directions of construction of the modern Romanian political discourse, in relation to them.

• Details
• Contents