Neagu Djuvara’s Civilisations et Lois Historiques and Its (Lack of An) American Reception, or About a Certain Oldness of the “New Europe”
Neagu Djuvara’s Civilisations et Lois Historiques and Its (Lack of An) American Reception, or About a Certain Oldness of the “New Europe”

Summary/Abstract: Djuvara was convinced that he missed an academic career in America because he did not have anyone to rely on. Maybe this was true. But in 1991, reviewing Djuvara’s Les Pays Roumain entre Orient et Occident: Les Principautés Danubiennes au Début du XIXe siècle (Paris, 1989), George F. Jewsbury, then at Oklahoma State University, wrote that Djuvara’s book, while having “the pace and catholicity of a Michelin guide” and being “a delight to read,” filled as it is with “bizarre details,” “flashes of insight,” and “absorbing anecdotes,” is marred by a “narrow, Paris-based interpretation of Westernization and its sources,” by “Francophilia,” “impressionism” and by “a certain elitism.” If this is true, then maybe the same paradigm shaped Djuvara’s earlier book, Civilisations et Lois Historiques. It is then not impossible to understand how this could have made him appear as extremely old-fashioned in the eyes of the 1970’s American academic world into which he was trying to find a way.

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