Lucian Boia’s Traps of History – Romanian Intellectual Elites Between 1930 and 1950
Lucian Boia’s Traps of History – Romanian Intellectual Elites Between 1930 and 1950

Summary/Abstract: Intellectuals are in fashion. A quick glance on the Internet shows that in the 1990s the first large published compendia on intelligentsia appeared in France, while a few years ago the encyclopaedic Thinkers, Philosophers, Intellectuals1 was published. After the turn of the millennium, a plethora of British and American works were written on the subject. In Hungary, Paul Johnson became fashionable. His book ruthlessly dissected left-wing intellectuals from Tolstoy to Chomsky, while right-wing thinkers were largely spared his opprobrium. Chomsky meanwhile argued with a touch of classical reasoning that intellectuals are “a kind of secular priesthood” whose task is to “uphold the doctrinal truths of the society”, and therefore “the population should be anti-intellectual in that respect, I think that’s a most healthy reaction”.

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