Lucian Boia and the Demythologization of the Romanian Historical Discourse. Intellectual Origins, Arguments and Critics
Lucian Boia and the Demythologization of the Romanian Historical Discourse. Intellectual Origins, Arguments and Critics

Summary/Abstract: In the 1990s the demythologizing scholarly efforts of Lucian Boia directed towards the Romanian historiography steered a rather fierce debate about the way history discourse was constructed in the 18th and the 19th centuries, being heavily influenced by the ideological commandments of the time. In this article I concentrate on the intellectual origins of this evolution by exploring the intellectual evolution of Lucian Boia. He started his professional career as a rather conservative historian of the Romanian national movement from Transylvania, and then moved to historiography and to the history of the imaginary on which he finally wrote a seminal theoretical book. All these intellectual details from Lucian Boia’s biography are important prerequisites that could explain the initiation of the demythologizing of the Romanian national historical discourses in the 1990s. I analyze the main points of Lucian Boia’s argumentation and finally I discuss some epistemological question related with the nature of historical studies in general, that emerged within the context of Lucian Boia’s reception.

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