Publicistica savantului Nicolae Petrescu şi cauza naţională în anii formării României Mari
The National Cause in Nicolae Petrescu’s Publications (1915-1920)

Summary/Abstract: Nicolae Petrescu (1886-1954) is one of the he most eclectic and subtle Romanian encyclopaedists of the 20th centuries, with remarkable contributions in the fields of philosophy, history, sociology, economics or political sciences. Yet, beyond his scholarly writings devoted to his academic pursuits, Petrescu was a man of his times, interested in understanding the so frequent political and economic transformations which have shaped history in the last hundred years. At the outbreak of WWI, Petrescu was studying in Switzerland, from where he left, in 1915, for the United States, in search of a more favourable and quiet milieu for his philosophical quests. But in the American libraries he witnessed the avatars of Romania’s participation at the Great War, Petrescu being forced to replace the interest for metaphysical subtleties with that for the more harsh realities of the war. The paper analyses, on the basis of his memories, how the Romanian scholar experienced, from a distance of 7,000 km, the misfortunes and ultimate successes of his fatherland, and, as well, how Petrescu contributed to the realization of the Romanian national ideal by writing articles for several extremely influential American publications: “The New York Times”, “The Bankers Magazine”, „The Pan American Magazine” etc. In the same time, he lectured at Wabash College, Indiana, in support of the righteousness of the Romanian cause and wrote an interesting volume, Thoughts on Peace and War. An Inquiry into the Conceptions prevailing in Foreign Policy, in which he expressed his idealistic-wilsonian conceptions on the future organization of the world.

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