Intelectuali şi „capcane politice” în România interbelică
Intellectuals and “Political Traps” in Interwar Romania

Summary/Abstract: In this paper I aim to discuss the role played by public intellectuals in interwar Romania starting from a series of recent analyses relative to this period, analyses which state that these intellectuals were „ensnared” by the fascination of totalitarianism. I do not intend to claim that the stances against the democratic political system – manifested by the most representative intellectuals of interwar Romania – are specific only to the Romanian area but on the contrary, I aim to include them in a populist trend which became manifest in the interwar period, either in the form of fascism or in that of bolshevism. Such an approach, which subscribes to the above mentioned analyses, takes a position „against” a particular contemporary intellectual trend, which projects retrospectively, a „romantic” perspective on the Romanian interwar period. A possible explanation for this state of affairs stems from the fact that, in post-communism, the axiological recovery of the interwar period has been an attempt to make a historical compensation for the totalitarian-based social engineering of the communist age. Although understandable from a symbolical perspective, this vision does not annul the fact that the interwar itself was a period which encompassed totalitarian political and social attitudes, even if the latter did not have the impact of those specific to the communist dictatorship. In any case, by positionning themselves against the democratic organisation of society and by conveying the idea of a „historical necessity” which claimed „another type of politics”, the most important intellectuals of the interwar period supported and, in some cases, even justified totalitarian attitudes and political decisions.

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