Petre P. Carp. Un portret perspectivist
Petre P. Carp. A Perspectivist Portrait

Summary/Abstract: Petre P. Carp. A perspectivist portrait. The image of the conservative politician Petre P. Carp has been deformed by clichés such as: someone “sold to foreign powers” (especially German), a retrograde thinker, a supporter of authoritarian leadership, a promoter of state socialism, etc. Created by his political opponents, they survived him. Even in the attempts to recover the activity and the thoughts of this politician, such as those made in the interwar period, critical sense did not triumph over these ready-made ideas. Later on, the Marxist ideological interpretation took over these clichés and it included them into its own explicative system. Accusing, communist historiography created for Carp the (deformed) image of a landowner who was incapable of transgressing the narrow economic, social and political interests of the class to which he belonged in favour of the oppressed. Assuming the critical observations formulated by post-communist historiography, I opted for the perspectivist method of interpretation put forth by Karl Mannheim. This way of interpreting facts allowed me to see a conservative who thought and acted in order to meet his own interest (his becoming the model of a politician different from most other political men), that of his party (taking hold of power), and that of the social category to which he belonged (preserving the economic, social, and political position of the great landowners), but without losing sight of great goals such as the modernisation of the Romanian society or the improvement of national security. His professionalism, his moral rectitude and his civility recommend him as a political model which deserves to be recovered.

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