La démocratie roumaine: vocation ou exercice de volonté?
Romanian Democracy: Vocation or Will?

Summary/Abstract: Representing democracy in the 19th century Romanian political discourse means, first of all, to focus the analysis on the implications the concept of democracy could provide. In the period following the 1848 revolution, and especially after 1866, the concept of Romanian democracy and its place within political discourse are conditioned by philosophical and historiographical discontinuities between the periods, by the intellectual sources, by the political and by the institutional framework of that time. In this sense, democracy should be regarded as a fundamental concept to political and institutional development in the last three decades of 19th century. In the critical approach of democracy as it appears in the Romanian political discourse, the vocation or the instinct of being democratic is constantly denied by a more plausible approach - the "volitional" democracy. This aspect might serve as an explanation to the multiple hesitations of the democratic background of the founding Romanian institution. The present article goes on this path, analyzing an example of political discourse in the works of a member of the "1866" generation.

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