Nicolae Iorga as New Man. Functions of a Teacher Cult
Nicolae Iorga as New Man. Functions of a Teacher Cult

Summary/Abstract: Nicolae Iorga is the towering figure of historical studies in Romania. The sheer volume of scholarship he produced throughout his life combined with heavy involvement in politics before and after the First World War amount to a highly complex intellectual biography. He was a central figure in the process of the nationalization of the Romanian nation-state both as an epistemic interpreter and as a political figure. The fate of his biography, ideas, and scholarship during the communist regime is inextricably tied to the latter’s development on the path to domestication. My study analyzes some of the central aspects of the double-edged process through which N. Iorga officially attained the status of founding father of the Romanian history-production while simultaneously becoming the subject of a cult of personality from mid-1960s onward. Nicolae Iorga, as a symbolic and scientific authority, transformed into a central legitimizer of state socialism’s historiographically encoded identitarian master narrative.

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