An Intellectual Portrait in Retrospect

Introduction Alexandru Duțu had established himself first and foremost as a historian of mentalities. The aim of the following pages is to highlight and uncover the core structural elements that brought about Alexandru Duțu’s scholarly works. These elements pertain to the realm of concepts and ideas. Since the history of ideas had been the large field of Alexandru Duțu’s investigations, the methodology we are going to employ is to a large extent, but not exclusively, connected to the one used by the Romanian historian. Questions of method will be addressed hereafter. However, to state the clear adherence of Alexandru Duțu to the claim of being primarily an explorer in the relations of past and present mental constructs within society, it would be advisable to reminisce the historian’s own testimony: “The variation of cultures and their depth are better comprehended by the history of mentalities than by any other intellectual discipline. For the works of art, a careful examination of the contemporary mentalities grasps what the environment wherein that work had been elaborated had conveyed to the artist – on an intellectual and affective level – from the debate and climate of the moment, from the patterns of thought and the automatisms transmitted from a generation to the next, as well as what the artist had created from the said elements, which we, in our turn, reinterpret.”1 Consequently, a few lines should be dedicated to the issues of what sort of history of ideas Alexandru Duțu was arguing in favor of. A prominent place in Alexandru Duțu’s studies is held by comparative cultural constructs, either at the level of literature or in regard to various mental patterns expressed in oral and scriptural traditions as well. Alexandru Duțu does not favor a reductionist understanding of history, wherein society is subjected solely to the models of economic development or to the sociological turning points in the process of modernization. Although the concept of modernity in the social sciences is associated with the Westernmodeled secular, democratic and capitalist societies that follow in the footsteps of the Industrial Revolution, Alexandru Duțu envisages another perspective on the subject: mental 1

Alexandru Duțu, Dimensiunea umană a istoriei. Direcții în istoria mentalităților, editura Meridiane, București, 1986, p. 41.

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structures shift gradually and are exposed to shocks only when society passes through a series of groundbreaking transformations. The same wide scope of the history of mentalities is summed up below: “There is a growing feeling that investigation of what men have thought and felt, and of the basic ideas in which they have seen themselves and framed their aspirations, may provide a more luminous source of light in the study of man that the established social, political and psychological sciences, for all that many of these have developed an apparatus of specialized terminology and the use of empirical, quantitative methods. For in so far as they tend to view men, both as individuals and groups, as the proper objects of the generalizing empirical sciences, as so much passive, inexpressive material moulded by impersonal forces obedient to statistical or causal laws, these sciences tend to leave out, or at least play down, something of central importance: namely that men are defined precisely by the possession of an inner life, of purposes and ideals, and of a vision or conception, however hazy and implicit, of who they are, where they have from, and what they are at.”2 The marks left by these sudden shifts in terms of lifestyle translate into new visions of life in connection to the evolution of ideas and mentalities, i.e. moral practices, the arts, all cultural embodiments of the human spirit. The kind of method embraced by the historian of ideas (the same withhold by the Romanian scholar) is cogently approached by Arthur Lovejoy and expressed as follows: “Another part of his business, if he means to take cognizance of the genuinely operative factors in the larger movements of thought, is an inquiry which may be called philosophical semantics - a study of the sacred words and phrases of a period or a movement, with a view to a clearing up of their ambiguities, a listing of their various shades of meaning, and an examination of the way in which confused associations of ideas arising from these ambiguities have influenced the development of doctrines, or accelerated the insensible transformation of one fashion of thought into another, perhaps its very opposite. It is largely because of their ambiguities that mere words are capable of this independent action 2

Isaiah Berlin, Against the Current. Essays in the History of Ideas, Princeton University Press, 2001, pp. xvi-xvii.

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as forces in history. A term, a phrase, a formula, which gains currency or acceptance because one of its meanings, or of the thoughts which it suggests, is congenial to the prevalent beliefs, the standards of value, the tastes of a certain age, may help to alter beliefs, standards of value, and tastes, because other meanings or suggested implications, not clearly distinguished by those who employ it, gradually become the dominant elements of its signification.”3

Alexandru Duțu’s object of analysis has remained during his whole lifetime the transition of mentalities, that could be identified in written of oral accounts, between the eighteenth century discourse and the modern appeal of revolutionary ideas borrowed from the West in the course of the first decades in the nineteenth century. Together with his genuine propensity for comparative studies ascribed to the topic of a common European identity in a patchwork of cultures and languages spreading on the surface of the continent, Alexandru Duțu had been a representative of the type of historian which in France is personified in the Annales School’s followers Robert Mandrou, Georges Duby and Roger Chartier. The Romanian scholar’s predicament as a historian of ideas can be identified in the words of Arthur Lovejoy:

“Finally, it is a part of the eventual task of the history of ideas to apply its own distinctive analytic method in the attempt to understand how new beliefs and intellectual fashions are introduced and diffused, to help to elucidate the psychological character of the processes by which changes in the vogue and influence of ideas have come about; to make clear, if possible, how conceptions dominant, or extensively prevalent, in one generation lose their hold upon men's minds and give place to others.”4

As far as the methodology of our paper is concerned, it is largely inspired from the works of Reinhart Koselleck, that is we are prone on devising a history of the genealogy of concepts in Alexandru Duțu’s particular case, focusing rather on a few key words that subsume both his 3 4

Arthur Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, Harvard University Press, 2001, p. 14. Ibidem, p. 20.

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methodological scope and the conceptual density of his analysis of the Romanian case. To put it in a nutshell, Reinhart Koselleck model traces back the layers of meanings, often time contradictory and partly identical to the current use, embedded in a concept (such as democracy, liberalism, equality, nobility, peasantry etc.) and how these mutations inspire the contemporary Weltanschauung concerning the availability of the concept in the public discourse.

“Clearly a concept’s meanings were thought to involve its placement within a hierarchy of meaning, the cumulative effect of the lexicon being to elucidate a complex network of semantic change in which particular concepts might play a varying role over time. In this respect a basic diachronic perspective would be supplemented by synchronic insights.”5 As we have also highlighted in the section of conclusions, Armin Heinen and Victor Neumann have replicated Reinhart Koselleck’s historiographical model and coedited a book6 in which a handful of concepts related with the Romanian society are being scrutinized. The overall conclusion is that the modernization process in Romania relates directly to the morphology of the most widely-used concepts (both in matters of political doctrine and the national historiography) and that mentalities trigger a set of reactions at the social level that shape the public and the private culture.

Notwithstanding similar critical efforts, the originality of our endeavor stems from the attempt of trying to construct a conceptual history within Alexandru Duțu’s oeuvre. In order to make matters as clear as possible to the apprehensive reader, we will try to pinpoint the main critical aspects in reading the Romanian historian’s scholarly output. Consequently, we will start with a short conceptual description of his works in a chronological order.

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Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time, Columbia University Press, 2004, p. XV. Victor Neumann, Armin Heinen (editors), Istoria României prin concepte, editura Polirom, Iași, 2010.

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The first published books, besides the scholarly articles regarding the liturgical culture in eighteenth century Romanian lands, are bibliographical studies7, one coauthored in 1962 on the reception of the nineteenth century Romanian writer Ion Luca Caragiale and the other, entitled A bibliographical essay, having as subject matter the reception of William Shakespeare’s legacy in the Romanian literary tradition. The subject of Dante’s reception in the Romanian language will be the object of further studies on the issue of comparative literature. Alexandru Duțu highlights his professional expertise as a librarian at the Romanian Academy during the period, while his interest in foreign languages and attraction for a wide comparative perspective of literary traditions across Europe will lead to both translations from Keith Gilbert Chesterton’s novels and psychological tracts such as De l'acte à la pensée by Henri Wallon. Topics as varied as the birth of Romanian national consciousness at the close of the eighteenth century or the impact of the Enlightenment on the European East, particularly on the Romanian culture will be turned into academic articles shortly afterwards.

However, it will be the publication of the 1968’s book Coordonate ale culturii românești în secolul al XVIII-lea (1700-1821)8 that will spark Alexandru Duțu’s genuine interest in the history of ideas. Since the topics of the book have been dealt by us in one of the first chapters of the subsequent study and there is little reason to focus on the content here, we will make a parallel between the concepts highlighted in this book and their place within the larger systematic approach of the following texts. The Begriffsgeschichte school of thought will be of help at this point of our presentation. One of the concepts utilized by Alexandru Duțu reflects the spread of Enlightenment ideas and ideals in the quasi-folkloric and –scriptural descriptions of everyday life, medical, moral and professional advice, in the works of the age. Alexandru Duțu stresses the dichotomy between the world-from-within, subjected to the commands of the organic ethos under the sway of long-lasting Byzantine traditions, and the-outside-world, expressed in the belief that scientific enlightened reason might cure most, if not all, social ills – a belief

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For an in-depth outlay, cf. Laurențiu Vlad (editor), La dimension humaine de l’histoire, editura Institutul European, Iași, 2012, pp. 267-314. 8 Alexandru Duțu, Coordonate ale culturii românești în secolul al XVIII-lea (1700-1821). Studii si texte, Editura pentru Literatură, București, 1968.

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borrowed from French works circulating all around Europe in the period. Most publications spread a mixture of religious ethical prudence, a quest for secular learning, an openness to social and political progress, all tied into the topic of role-models to be followed by the local elites. The mixture of different cultural traditions into a single blend is to Alexandru Duțu a trademark of the kind of synthetizes that the oral-written cultural layers have striven to achieve. The final result is envisaged by Alexandru Duțu as an original prototype of the shifting mentalities within the local community:

“(…) the development of mentalities has triggered a change in the idea of man, inasmuch as supporting the values of literature has always been based on the interlinking of written literature with the popular, oral one; the development shows at the same time the creation of a balance between the newly-bred national consciousness and the European consciousness.”9

The tight connection between often contradictory mentalities testifies to the model of the world-from-within suffused in the outside-world of scientific mundane curiosity. Daily affairs and interspersed with metaphysical musings – this is the conclusion of the Alexandru Duțu’s first book on the history of mentalities.

As we proceed onwards, the subject of the pre-modern Romanian literature, explored as part of a history of mentalities concentrating on the same interrelations as mentioned above, is tackled with in the 1969 book Explorări în istoria literaturii române10. However, the year that brought about an intellectual acme in Alexandru Duțu’s scholarly career is without any shadow of doubt 1972, when three books will be printed. Eseu în istoria modelelor umane comprises six lengthy essays in the history of ideas before the fragments translated for the first time into Romanian by Alexandru Duțu from Eugenio Garin, Paul Hazard and Arthur Lovejoy. Alexandru Duțu’s essays deal with the prototypes of humanity as envisaged in different historical settings from our own: it begins with the age of Renaissance and their “models” of human achievement and 9

Ibidem, p. 356. Alexandru Duțu, Explorări în istoria literaturii române, Editura pentru Literatură, București, 1969.

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ends before the advent of the French Revolution. The works of Dante, Shakespeare and Michel de Montaigne will be analyzed on the canvass of an epoch rich in ideas, most of them expressed by other thinkers of the age as well. The French classical authors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries will not be spared too. Alexandru Duțu’s overt intention is to showcase how the “models of humanity” (in a historical subsequence we come across the knight, the man of learning, the hero, the gentleman) have evolved over time and how the intricate topic of human nature had been imprinted by the spiritual tribulations of each age according to its own internal needs and prerequisites. The ties between the ancient quest for knowledge and the scholastic and religious commandments assume the form of civilization in which matters are posed. Humanism comes to the fore:

“Man turns into a masterpiece less due to conformity to prescribed models and more because of the conservation of his humanity during the experiences he has to pass through. The human model is grandiose only because the knowledge of humankind has been enriched and the idea of man has acquired such wide proportions that, in a way, man becomes his own creator; a sense of anxiety cannot be missed from this splendid selfassuredness.”11

From this anxious feeling that all cultural designs are subjected to the eroding force of time, if they are not its own offspring.

“For two centuries, the efforts made to perfect and correct beliefs, institutions and the arts had been mostly subject to the opinion that, in any sphere of activity, man has to conform as much as possible to a universally acclaimed standard, lacking any complexity, unchanged, uniform for any human being. To put it briefly, the enlightenment has been an age, at least in its main tendency, of the simplification and standardization of thought and life – to standardization by simplification.”12

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Alexandru Duțu, Eseu în istoria modelelor umane, Editura Științifică, București, 1972, p. 131. Ibidem, p. 265.

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As an applied study of mental constructs and of the standing of humanism in the Romanian countries before 1800s, Sinteză și originalitate în cultură română13 is the next book which we will highlight here, focusing, like always, on its conceptual toolbox. Similar to the methodological kernel of other studies, Alexandru Duțu investigates the way in which all the literary works of a period have managed to structure the fields of knowledge, to build a hierarchy of values and to reinforce the layers of different/similar mentalities within a given society. At the cultural level, breaking with the traditional world towards a rational civilization as expressed by the enlightened west did not bring about a radical ideological chasm, but only an ideological restructuring along modern lines. By tracing back the history of books in the Romanian countries between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, emphasizing the circulation and the top-down impact on the local mentalities, Alexandru Duțu designs several concepts that express the degree of the transition to modern patters of thinking: the civic humanism, the enlightened patriotism, the 1848 romanticism. All of these conceptual acquisitions will be detailed further on in our study, but what ties them together is the challenge posed to a traditional society of a reformist intellectual paradigm that was melting away and shuffling old mentalities in new disguises.

Perhaps the most scholarly study of the same year is to be found in Cărțile de înțelepciune în cultura română.14 The book is constructed as series of studies assembled in a history of mentalities pertaining to the political leadership in the two Romanian kingdoms around the 1800s. Alexandru Duțu concentrates on the “books of behavior”, which circulated among the scholars and clergymen of the time as tokens of the humanist ideals of a traditional society on its road to structural and mental reforms. The questions of citizenship and the citizen is already addressed in the same age. Rigorously demonstrated by Alexandru Duțu, most books of the age had a didactic flavour and were both miscellanea of classical Greek and Latin texts, fragments from the French moralists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and popular folktales. There was a practical purpose to these collections of aphorisms and historical moralization, which was of setting society into patterns along moral and intellectual characteristics and giving 13 14

Alexandru Duțu, Sinteză și originalitate în cultura română, Editura Enciclopedică Română, București, 1972. Alexandru Duțu, Cărțile de înțelepciune în cultura română, editura Academiei, București, 1972.

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advice in the practical tasks of political leadership and matters of statehood. The process was all too common in Eastern European outskirts at the time. Another genre detailed by Alexandru Duțu is the political self-help texts of the period, which spread across the Romanian lands and are called mirrors for princes (Fürstenspiegel), another testimony to the political self-awareness that was spreading like wildfire among the political elites of the age. Alexandru Duțu identifies the minor discourse changes, from the narrow moral predicaments to the more widespread political practical piece of advice as a sure sign of reforms that were taking place at the level of the larger society too.

“The changing economic activity and the new social relations from the Romanian countries, as well as in the neighboring empires that influenced the domestic feudal social, were posing new issues to absolutism (…) The intellectuals were formulating all these inquiries with a force and ingenuity that were breaking apart all the boundaries of the written and spoken word; they became more interested in matters that belonged to political theory and practice; the first specialists that deepened the aspects of the field in unprecedented distinct ways have been drafted from among their ranks.”15

The first enlightened historical accounts of the past are to be identified in the transitional period emphasized by Alexandru Duțu by the mental construct of France during its imperial conquest of Europe under the leadership of the Emperor Napoleon. The specific emphasis on the English models of social respectability and esteem is testified by the interest showed in the period for Lord Chesterfield’s model of a gentleman. Umaniștii români și cultura europeană16 parallels the cultural interrelatedness between the Western pattern of humanity as expressed in the works of the time and the Eastern postByzantine appreciations on the same debate. What Alexandru Duțu intends to portray lies in the manifold similarities and subtle differentiations between the types of European cultures that had gained self-consciousness in the respective centuries. The some topics will be 15 16

Ibidem, p. 99. Alexandru Duțu, Umaniștii români și cultura europeană, editura Meridiane, București, 1974.

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developed and improved in terms of historical minutiae in the 1978 book Cultura română în civilizația europeană modernă17 and the 1981 book European Intellectual Movements and Modernization of Romanian Culture.18 Inquiries regarding the Otherness in comparative studies of mentalities, as well as the cultural shocks experienced by the author himself in his visits across the Atlantic Ocean or in Western and Central Europe, are brought together in Modele, imagini, priveliști and Călătorii, imagini, constante. The 1982 study on comparative literature and the history of mentalities19 is steeped in the outlining of a methodological scheme similar to that of Roger Chartier’s and a historical demonstration that relates the mentalities of Eastern Europe to the same currents of thinking radiating from the West.

One of the chapters in our paper will deal largely with the concepts and implications of Literatura comparată și istoria mentalităților in the context of all of Duțu’s attempts of building a history of mentalities of the pre-modern Romanian lands. Dimensiunea umană a istoriei20 (1986) is an archway over time reminiscent in its mainlines, not particularly in its subject or intention, to Eseu în istoria modelelor umane (1972), highlighting extracts from important scholarly works never translated before and delivered to the Romanian public, together with Alexandru Duțu’s own assessment of the mentalities at work in the traditional communities of eastern Europe when modernity struck the region from the West. A few interesting studies on the topics of travel literature in the pre-modern Romanian kingdoms and to what degree had the Anglo-Saxon culture impressed on the Romanian intelligentsia in the inter-war period are gathered in Modele, imagini, priveliști.21

Following the collapse of the Soviet Bloc in 1989, Alexandru Duțu had engaged more openly in journalistic endeavors, most of which will be gathered in the posthumous volume, edited by

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Alexandru Duțu, Cultura română în civilizația europeană modernă, editura Meridiane, București, 1978. Alexandru Duțu, European Intellectual Movements and Modernization of Romanian Culture, editura Academiei, București, 1981. 19 Alexandru Duțu, Literatura contemporană și istoria mentalităților, editura Univers, București, 1982. 20 Alexandru Duțu, Dimensiunea umană a istoriei, editura Meridiane, București, 1986. 21 Alexandru Duțu, Modele, imagini, priveliști, editura Dacia, Cluj-Napoca, 1979, pp. 30-139. 18

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Laurențiu Vlad, Lumea dinăuntru și lumea din afară22. The broad selection of articles and studies published in periodicals or literary magazines by Alexandru Duțu conveys an exact image of the vast areas of research that the Romanian historian had dedicated his lifetime work. There is no subject broached in Lumea dinăuntru și lumea din afară that had not been covered extensively and thoroughly in all the books mentioned in passing in the previous paragraphs: overarching cultural mentalities and overt stereotypes, the function of imagination in designing cultural patterns, the historical tradition and cultural memory, the Romanian identity in an European comparative framework and many others as well.

Notwithstanding all these all-encompassing social and cultural matters there are two important books published in the late 1990s, shortly before Alexandru Duțu’s death. The former bears the title Political Models and National Identities in “Orthodox Europe”23, which is a history, largely inspired from the university courses that Alexandru Duțu had taught in the last decade of his life, of the thinking and of the political mentalities in European East set in a comparative perspective with the political and ideological projects carried on in the West. The questions of the role occupied by tradition, customs and the religious background are asked once more, but enriched both in detail and analysis from the 1970’s books that have dealt with the same issues. The latter book, entitled Ideea de Europa și evoluția conștiinței europene24 had been the inspiration of one of the chapters in the present paper and, since the relevancy and the substance of the book holds a unique place in the context of Alexandru Duțu’s works, there is no reason to delve in the topic at this point. Suffice it to say that the multiple identities of the continent are depicted as both the place where cultural similarities and dissimilarities combine and differentiate at the same time.

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Alexandru Duțu, Laurențiu Vlad (editor), Lumea dinăuntru și lumea din afară, editura Universității din București, 2009. 23 Alexandru Duțu, Political Models and National Identities in , editura Babel, București, 1998. 24 Alexandru Duțu, Ideea de Europa și evoluția conștiinței europene, editura All, București, 1999.

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*** What does our study bring new in terms of Alexandru Duțu’s work? To try to answer these questions, one is urged to divide the full answer in two: one part restricted to the hypotheses of our study and the steps taken in order to reach for a conclusion. This would be the strictly original side of our paper. The other part, however, is to review the studies, academic articles and books that have settled on the topic of Alexandru Duțu’s intellectual legacy and, as far as possible, clearly state what has been our standing concerning the general issue.

Our hypotheses, never before addressed and hence highly original, is that Alexandru Duțu has managed to construct an original cultural explanation of the foundations underlying the Romanian society before the modernization process and that his framework checks the political and social development of the Romanian society during its modernization process to this very day. We assume from the start the unfinished political, social and economic process of modernization in Romania and we take as a point of reference the example of the Western European full-fledged modern societies, since from the 1830s onwards the European West had been the benchmark of all modernizing attempts in Romania. “Catching up with the West” had been the unrectified aim of the Romanian elites since the nineteenth century, even during the Communist fiasco regime.

The means through which this desideratum could have been realized have varied according to the various ideological fads that have been borne on the European continent. However, we will not engage into this tangled ideological matter. If Alexandru Duțu builds a cultural model in which the patchwork is knit together by the Orthodox religion, post-Byzantium mentalities, an organic community that does not discriminate between the secular and the divine. The process of reforms following the release from the Ottoman domination in the 1820s had been in the middle way between preserving cultural patterns and plotting a modern state, run by the economic elites of the age. The failures or the partial achievements of the modernizing state stem one-sidedly – at least this could be an interpretation of Alexandru Duțu’s histories – from the misunderstanding of the organic ties and the morphological unity of the rural community 12

by the elites in charge. Our paper hypothesizes that Alexandru Duțu had provided the local historiography with original concepts in order to comprehend the parallel function of mentalities, habits, customs and forlorn traditions across the European East. Simultaneously, the gradual slow-paced introduction of new ways of thinking in the East after 1700s is also reinforced in Alexandru Duțu’s works. The originality of his attempt will be proven in the section regarding the methods and the schools of thinking that have swayed the Romanian historian, most of which relate only little to the national historiography. At the same time, Alexandru Duțu’s own assessments will be scrutinized as far as any ingrained traces of a personal political philosophy are concerned.

Consequently, the kind of history of concepts we are advocating within Alexandru Duțu’s body of works is in fact a diachronous interpretation of how the local society has portrayed itself in its own conceptual records. The development of the political consciousness requires a history of the stages, expressed in the vernacular language, through which the mentalities themselves have proceeded. Hence, Alexandru Duțu’s importance cannot be underestimated. He provides the concepts of the Romanian modernization that express the shifting self-perception of society in its quest for change. At the end of our study, the reader should keep in mind two ideas: one is related to the conceptual scaffolding erected by Alexandru Duțu and how it replenishes the gaps in the historical records. The second pertains to how the concepts reflect directly into the material conditions of society. Eagerly balancing the mentalities with the political and social turmoil of the elite’s reformist agenda had been one intention of the current study.

Another quest we have set on (and presumably accomplished) is that of constantly paralleling Alexandru Duțu’s methodology with that of other similar projects in the Western historiographical body of references. Hence, we have decided to divide the bulk of our paper on the most illustrative hermeneutical lenses assembled by Alexandru Duțu’s laborious works: the flow of ideas between the past and the present in a scholar’s education in traditional societies, the distinct stages between traditionalism and modernity in the evolution of ideas and mentalities within the elites themselves in Eastern Europe, the purpose of a both outside and 13

inside source of reference which has been the Western European archetypical model, the harmonious farrago of the written and oral cultures as a token of an organic community that has not yet been broken into civic factions, and, last but not least, the pivotal role of religion in the realm of worldly affairs. Furthermore, there comes the moment when other analytical inquiries on the topic of Alexandru Duțu will be reviewed here. The first lengthy study belongs to Ioan Stanomir25. Based largely on the articles published in various journals, magazines and newspapers after the fall of communism, Ioan Stanomir depicts Alexandru Duțu’s contribution as a living contemporary that casts a new light on the present domestic affairs. This is not to say that there are no large sections reserved solely to Alexandru Duțu’s academic contribution as well: his traditionalist view on the organic community of premodern Romania and the emphases placed on the “invention of traditions” brought about by the Romantic and Westernized local elite in 1848 (together with the power of the state in molding a new society, in utter disregard to the past and the civilizational model of the Eastern European territories) are clearly depicted in Ioan Stanomir’s long chapter. However, it is the cultural ethos that is to be preserved and cherished from Alexandru Duțu: the dissolving moral relativism of all modernizing projects is set against the decency and the stability of long-tried moral habits derived from a religious background. Communism is portrayed as the radical modernist experiment, which is imbued by progressive and secularist ideas that are at work in many political theories of modernity and that hold a great symbolic power on the functioning of the modern state. The relevancy of conservative ideas resides in that it is able to bring to life once more the powers engrained in the local organic tradition, which is ostensibly set against the charms of xenophobic nationalism, cultural parochialism and radical ideological imports from the West. From Ioan Stanomir’s analytical interpretation one feels trapped between a failed modernity that confines human nature to the computations of reason alone and the search for a way out of the dark maze by grasping the weak threads of half-dead and halfhearted traditions. The process of forced industrialization, followed by the uncontrolled growth of disharmonic and architecturally appalling cities, the ruins left behind by Communism stand 25

Ioan Stanomir, Conștiința conservatoare, editura Nemira, București, 2004, pp. 149-195.

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out as testimonies to the future generations of the destructive whims of a political ideology oriented to uprooting the traditional view of religion and culture on the spurious question of “human nature”. Alexandru Duțu is portrayed as a moral harbinger and an intuitive lighthouse in the bowels of the Leviathan represented by the Party and the ominous State apparatus.

Individuality was crushed and crumbled by the modernizing revolutionary zeal. Recovering a sense of man’s inner dignity in the eyes of God and the moral obligation this conveys remain a constant theme in Ioan Stanomir’s assessment of Alexandru Duțu’s intellectual case. Gradualism and an inflexible strife between the invading “new” and the skeptical “old” are tantamount to a stable democracy and a prosperous citizenry. The respect towards tradition, prudence in all matters of public use, the rule of law are the conservative trademarks that Ioan Stanomir had managed to find in Alexandru Duțu’s post-Communist public standings. Despite all its analytical vitality and the presence of many issues that are correctly identified by Ioan Stanomir (and which our paper demands just to expand and further explore in subsequent chapters), there is a sense of reductionism in the political scientist’s overall attempt: the mild nationalism is also methodologically embedded in Alexandru Duțu’s pre-1989 works and scholarly articles, while the “interior exile” (and the quest for an oasis of morality in a cesspool of public ignominy) on the part of the Romanian scholar appears to be a convenient expiatory portrayal of a moral ambivalence that mars Alexandru Duțu’s biography in respect to his connections and interactions with some politically-oriented institutions of the period. We would rather not get into details at this point, since an introduction has its own internal boundaries.

Another challenging aspect in Ioan Stanomir’s demonstration concerns the modernization process itself: if the Communist experiment is relegated to the dustbin of history as a complete political failure that brutally debased the individual, there is little optimism for the prospects of a civilizational implant of Western values, ideas and, ultimately, institutions in a country wherein the past is continuously effaced and obliterated by the political elites themselves with every failed attempt at modernity. This programmatic self-denial poses a lot of problems to the 15

consciousness of what a cultural and national identity really stand for. One might even speak of a crooked timber of nation-building in the same terms as any other secularist twentieth century socially engineering scheme had been. The question of conservatism will once again show up in our current project later on, close to the end of our present study. However, we owe a lot of gratitude to Ioan Stanomir’s expository writing on Alexandru Duțu’s intellectual legacy since it had been the first consistent and ingenious critical appreciation on the matter.

Recently, Laurențiu Vlad had collected a wide range of studies, essays and personal testimonies26 regarding Alexandru Duțu. La dimension humaine de l’histoire is a vast resource of investigation. The foreword and the first entry were written by Laurențiu Vlad by enlarging and adding more critical insights to the study published in the introduction to the volume of collected articles Lumea dinăuntru și lumea din afară, which is, as far as we know, the first scholarly biographical account of Alexandru Duțu’s intellectual cursus honorum. Laurențiu Vlad’s contribution to the topic is outstanding on two basic grounds: on the one hand it enlarges the scholar’s biography with rich details concerning the latter’s educational track, on the other hand it goes to much trouble in deciphering the mechanism of the historian’s interlocking of mentalities and modernity into a solid bedrock of a cultural critique.

Furthermore, Alexandru Zub’s statement on the works of Alexandru Duțu, as part as the same collective study, could be resumed in his own words, although it would be worth stating that his short piece on Alexandru Duțu’s original historical contribution is expanded by our own investigations in one section of the current paper:

“But his perpetual concern was the Romanian space – a space he meant to delineate as precisely as possible, taking into account the entire European context and especially its infinite South-Eastern determinations. This phenomenon always preoccupied him, and he spared no effort in defining it. His stage at the Romanian Academy Library, imposed on him by the adversity of the times, proved to be useful to that project, as it allowed him to get to 26

Laurențiu Vlad (editor), La dimension humaine de l’histoire, Institutul European, Iași, 2012.

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know like few others in his time the library’s manuscripts, correspondence files and ancient books; drawing on these, he endeavored to give a better explanation to the age of transition of the modern world, and then to Romanian modernity itself, which he studied either by sequences or through its defining ideas, as he has learned from his illustrious predecessors, amongst which Nicolae Iorga came first.”27

The next chapter in the book belongs to Alexandru Florin Platon, who attempts to prove how “subversive” was Alexandru Duțu’s attempt in an academic climate of subservience to the official ideological line.

“However, I dare to say that the systematic link established by Alexandru Duțu between mentalities and literature, meant to bestow the prestige of cultural comparatism upon the traditional approach exploring the connections between works and authors, resembles a hidden strategy of reception. It is hard to say how conscious or how instinctive, spontaneous adaptation to a specific political climate, this strategy was; yet we can safely assume that it was designed to infiltrate the Romanian history of literature and the Romanian historiography by some potentially subversive research methods and aims (not so much real, as it was assumed), could become an object of suspicion for the authorities.”28

Alexandru Florin Platon’s daring hypothesis is largely fascinating in his critical essay and, we would even dare to concede, the hypothesis itself is clear enough in want it sets to prove that it might deserve a further in-depth study. The relationship between mentalities and literature carries within it a political load only if it sets to criticize not only the private morality of individuals, but the systematic institutional uses and abuses of the state and, hence, the political status quo. This has been part of the intention, perhaps even one of the unmediated conclusions of Alexandru Duțu’s fondness for comparative literature in its connection to the history of mentalities. Furthermore, Alexandru Duțu’s methods before 1989 were rather 27 28

Ibidem, pp. 53-54. Ibidem, pp. 68-69.

17

isolated in an intellectual environment stifled by vulgar bursts of nationalism and Stalinist personality cults. Hence, there was somehow a “subversive” thorn in the Romanian historian’s research. However, there are traces in his work where Alexandru Duțu advocates sympathetically for a history in which nations-state still have a strong role to play. Although his light nationalism could be contrasted to the sheer nationalistic falsifications and gross folkloric appraisals of the official line of the state propaganda, Alexandru Duțu never confronted directly or even indirectly through his works the state-inspired official historiography before the 1989 Revolution. Alexandru Florin Platon’s claims are worthy of consideration and illuminating in many respects concerning a future research study on the addressed topic.

Simona and Toader Nicoară’s investigation on the connections between the Annales school and its Romanian reception is excellent in regard to Alexandru Duțu’s main role in refreshing the Romanian historiography with other perspectives in the late 1970’s and the 1980’s. Since the article is a thorough descriptive account of the various chains that link Alexandru Duțu’s own methods to the Annales school, there is no need to critically review a study that is devoid of any genuine intention to cast Alexandru Duțu in a controversial light. Daniel Henri Pageaux’s midway study between a biographical apologetic account and a bibliographical essay does not open any new vistas in understanding Alexandru Duțu’s originality as a scholar. It just reiterates some general statements on Alexandru Duțu. This is not the case in regard to Mircea Anghelescu’s paper who identifies (we presume) correctly the main threads in Alexandru Duțu’s research program:

“In fact, the very substance underlying the new forms of modernity, in literature as well as in culture at large, merely continues an old tradition, and coherently structures common methods, topic, tropes etc.; it condenses the existential experiences of an entire culture.”29

Roxane Argyropoulos’s and Nicolae Mihai’s acknowledgments of the type of history of mentalities developed by Alexandru Duțu are both congenial and shrewd, but the ideas seem to 29

Ibidem, p. 113.

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have been already identified by others before in the collective volume. Mirela Murgescu’s appraisal of Alexandru Duțu’s depiction of the importance of image and the figurative arts, as expressions of the deep layers of mentalities, is informative and fascinating for its comparisons and academic references. However, the merits of Murgescu’s study end where its boundaries have been confined. Iuliana Conovici puts a lot of stress on the religious dimension and the call to an Orthodox lifestyle in the works of Alexandru Duțu, which is also the object of study in Mădălina Vârtejeanu-Joubert’s analytical acknowledgement of the theological implications of the Romanian historian’s written records.

The remaining bulky part of the collective volume concentrates on the personal recollections of disciples, collaborators or academic acquaintances of Alexandru Duțu. Paul E. Michaelson, Norman Simms, Paschalis Kitromilides, Anna Tabaki express their gratitude in one way or another to the man that was Alexandru Duțu. Despite its high-pitched emotional tone, there are traces of important methodological hints which could be reshuffled and disjointed into clear conceptual implements. They have been integrated tacitly into the corpus of the current study. The volume closes with an evaluation by Norman Simms of the relevancy today of the history of ideas and mentalities.

“Rather than a purely social scientific enterprise, the new discipline was concerned with how history as a suite of mentalities shaped, permeated and created new versions of itself at a more unconscious level, becoming therefore logically and practically (…) a form of psycho-history, insofar as it dealt with group fantasies and traumatically induced actions, and cultural anthropology, insofar as those collective dreams and trance-like states were institutionalized and codified into law, governments and practical and aesthetic fashions.” 30

These have been the most knowledgeable critical surveys on Alexandru Duțu’s intellectual output and relevance to date and, although there might be articles published in the media a short time after the historian’s disappearance in 1999 (apart from obituaries), the first 30

Ibidem, p. 254.

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hermeneutical attempts of the genuine works are present in the review of the literature we have just highlighted. Hence, separate from the topic itself, there had been a need to dedicate a long paper, such as the one here, to the question of what had Alexandru Duțu to say about the cultural history of Eastern Europe and the fragile political identities of the place in coping with the demands of modernity at large. *** Another topic we should concentrate on refers to the logic behind our bibliography. Notwithstanding Alexandru Duțu’s many books and collection of articles, our methodological lenses imply a set of scholarly influences that have been incorporated explicitly into the main body of the following study. Therefore, we have divided the bibliographical corpus into two main parallel directions, responsible for a comparative overview of the subject matter: on the one hand, there is the cultural critique (expressed through books on the multiple currents of thought in the modern Romanian intellectual history, including the totalitarian period between 1948-1989) which was directed in favor of disclosing the deep elements underlining the local mentalities, irrespective of the social layer or educational background. We have mainly employed this technique as a means to a further end, which is to assess the cultural trademarks exposed by Alexandru Duțu in the light of the ideological standings taken by the Romanian elites during the society’s lengthy modernization process. Furthermore, it is only in regard to the ideological schools of late nineteenth century and early twentieth century prevalent in the Romanian society’s top intellectual echelons that Alexandru Duțu’s hindsight gains momentum. At the same time, extending our research to the communist timespan has provided us with insights into Alexandru Duțu’s own intellectual endeavors and the rationales behind them. In was in this context that Zigu Ornea’s, Apostal Stan’s and Victor Neumann’s works have turned out to be of great use, all of whom we owe a great deal.

However, we did not believe that a cultural study would be enough. There is no modern society in contrast with the traditional one (or, by any means, any society situated between the traditional past and the modern future) without being first and foremost adequately

20

economically developed (by adequate we have in mind the capitalist standards of the day). It was Bogdan Murgescu’s recent books that have guided us in this novel direction of research.

On the other hand, the other half of our references relies on the same cultural view, but this time it encompasses a history of ideological schools prevalent in Western European at the same time as the modernization process had been initiated in the Romanian lands. As a testimony to Alexandru Duțu’s debt to the history of ideas and mentalities, we have also set eyes on the ideological breakthrough represented by modernity in the nineteenth century. We have mainly concentrated on the clash between the conservative and the reformist liberal sides in regard to the radical secularist projects of the Enlightenment as expressed in political ideologies and views on society during the same age. Eastern Europe had not been outside of the influences radiating from the Western modern political projects. On the contrary, we believe that the history of the Eastern European countries between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries had provided a laboratory to test all Western ideological grand schemes. Isaiah Berlin, Russell Kirk, Hannah Arendt and other outstanding scholars have guided our paper all through its completion.

Consequently, an intellectual history of modern Europe swings to and fro between the cultural and economic ideological arguments. Hence, we felt a need to uncover elements of the economic modernization process, especially delving in the never-ending consequences of industrialization and the growth of national markets within the natural order of capitalism. Both left-oriented and right-oriented standings have been given their due share in the overall argument. The interconnections between economic prosperity and the fate of ideological shifts have been exposed every time we had the chance to do it. The actions and the reactions of traditional quarters have been looked into in this particular regard.

*** The last section of our introduction should cover the reasons behind choosing the current subject matter. The history of ideas had been a topic of constant interest during the 21

undergraduate years. Conservatism, classical liberalism and their modern avatars as expressed, for example, in the particular case of the American political thinker William F. Buckley Jr., have been our object of study during all the academic years. Henceforth, the never-ending intellectual quarrel between the forces of unbounded reason and the unrepentant belief in the material and spiritual progress of humankind and the skeptical, backward-looking, religiouslyinspired reaction of the anti-revolutionary conservatives of the nineteenth century. What to make of the age of enlightenment and how to grasp the consequences of modernity on the remnants of the distant past? The transient nature of all thought processes and the ephemeral social standings testify wholeheartedly to a changing man in an unsettled society (in this respect, we are merely paraphrasing Charles Baudelaire’s description of modernity). At first, our attention was caught entirely by the ideological contradictions in the history of political theory. The waves of contrasting ideas were not borne out of thin air. The internal transformation of society, especially the radical changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution and the protean dynamism of capitalism, had made us aware of the interconnection between the lofty realm of ideas and the realm of matter and human interest. What would the new social project lead us to? How would man look after centuries of Western intellectual and economic predominance? Wouldn’t the freedom of man finally be imperiled by the rise of the masses and the prevailing power of a single mental structure, irrespective of how unstill this may turn out to be?

”Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why such a large part of mankind gladly remain minors all their lives, long after nature has freed them from external guidance. They are the reasons why it is so easy for others to set themselves up as guardians. It is so comfortable to be a minor. If I have a book that thinks for me, a pastor who acts as my conscience, a physician who prescribes my diet, and so on--then I have no need to exert myself. I have no need to think, if only I can pay; others will take care of that disagreeable business for me. Those guardians who have kindly taken supervision upon themselves see to it that the overwhelming majority of mankind--among them the entire fair sex--should consider the step to maturity, not only as hard, but as extremely dangerous. First, these guardians make 22

their domestic cattle stupid and carefully prevent the docile creatures from taking a single step without the leading-strings to which they have fastened them. Then they show them the danger that would threaten them if they should try to walk by themselves. Now this danger is really not very great; after stumbling a few times they would, at last, learn to walk. However, examples of such failures intimidate and generally discourage all further attempts.”31

Did man get out of his credulous inclination to embrace any superstition without questioning it with the powers of the reason invested in him? Did modernity bring the much-craved for maturity expressed by Immanuel Kant? We searched the answers to all these inquiries in the history of ideas and we have focused entirely on the subject of unfinished modernization processes (which are unbounded per se, but could be isolated as a generational unit of measure), considering the model expression of a modern civilization in the European West. Implicitly, we were struck with the self-defeating awareness that Eastern Europe in general and Romania in particular had been involved in the whirlpool of modernity almost without consideration or deference to the region’s past and mental patterns. Society in the modern sense of the word, as a secular ideology subject to the control of reason, had also to be invented from the bottom up. The free market, the workings of the modern state institutions, the social hierarchy had been devised by the Westernized elites, subjecting an entire past to the confines of a single modernizing trajectory, drawn after the Western “civilization” advance. The race for progress had commenced. We questioned the inevitability and the success of the whole project.

It was in this circumstance that we encountered Alexandru Duțu’s books. The pre-modernity, the dark territory of forgetfulness and historical misapprehensions, suddenly came to life as to revenge all the bitter criticism it had to face from the friends of unquestioned progress. It was this feeling of incompleteness that dragged us in the direction of Alexandru Duțu’s histories of mentalities. It is what Isaiah Berlin had expressed in such eloquent lines: 31

Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, translated and edited by Mary J. Gregor, 1996.

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“Language, religious rites, myths, laws, social, religious, juridical institutions, are forms of self-expression, of wishing to convey what one is and strives for; they obey intelligible patterns, and for that reason it is possible to reconstruct the life of other societies, even those remote in time and place and utterly primitive, by asking oneself what kind of framework of human ideas, feelings, acts could have generated the poetry, the monuments, the mythology which were their natural expression. Men grow individually and socially; the world of men who composed the Homeric poems was plainly very different from that of the Hebrews to whom God had spoken through their sacred book, or that of the Roman Republic, or medieval Christianity, of Naples under the Bourbons. Patterns of growth are traceable.”32

Notwithstanding the merits of an analysis based on the evolution of man’s consciousness through time, another constant influence had been the theories of modernity that put a lot of emphasis on the spread of the global capitalist system. Society loses its traditional shackles, appropriates the use of scientific empirical reasoning in every aspect of the public organization of life and inscribes the principles of Enlightenment in its rule of conduct. The free competition of individuals in the market is balanced by a legal system that leaves room for a rational organization of any human endeavor in search of constant profits and practical expediencies. The power of objectified reason seems to lift man from his material grievances as long as the whole society is organized by the invisible hand of the market in the pursuit of material affluence. However, the consequences at the level of mentalities soon follow, that is “we must understand the ‘organic’ structure of society in terms of which alone the minds and activities and habits of its members can be understood.”33 This had been what we have striven to accomplish in detailing and presenting the conceptual scaffold of Alexandru Duțu’s histories on the organic ties of the pre-modern Romanian lands. The whole region is covered by the Romanian historian as well in his quest of establishing the mental patterns of the peoples and their civilization in the Eastern European outskirts. 32 33

Isaiah Berlin, Against the Current. Essays in the History of Ideas, Princeton University Press, 2001, pp. 4-5. Ibidem, p. 10-11.

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The modernization process is to be judged against the evidence of a shift in mentalities. The restructuring of society had been deep, but cultural remnants of the past prevailed. In this regard, we have been greatly indebted to Eugen Weber’s masterpiece, Peasants into Frenchmen. The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914. In Eugen Weber’s exhaustive demonstration, the society is built by the modernizing beacons of the urban centers, where the bourgeoisie has been brooding over its forthcoming: the capitalist market, the rational agency of the state expressed through taxation, schooling and conscription, the overwhelming myth of the nation instilled in the people as a means to a popular all-encompassing democratic consciousness. However, relics of the past were still a work in progress pretty close to the period of the 1850’s and the 1860’s:

“Despite evidence to the contrary, inhabitants of the hexagon in the 1870 generally knew themselves to be French subjects, but to many this status was no more than an abstraction. The people of whole regions felt little identity with the state or with people of other regions. Before this changed, before the inhabitants of France could come to feel a significant community, they had to share significant experiences with each other. Roads, railroads, schools, markets, military service, and the circulation of money, goods, and printed matter provided those experiences, swept away old commitments, instilled a national view of things in regional minds, and confirmed the power of that view by offering advancement to those who adopted it. The national ideology was still diffuse and amorphous around the middle of the nineteenth century. French culture became truly national only in the last years of the century.”34

For Eastern Europe, the tragedy of the twentieth century had been the modernizing visions of violent radical ideologies, but modernity acts in any corner of the planet within the confines of the same set of visible elements: secularism and rationalism as preached in schools, equality before the law against the power of privileges travestied as inborn rights of forlorn times, and 34

Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchman. The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914, Stanford University Press, 1976, p. 486.

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an unrepentant quest for material gains. All humanity is melted into a homogenous work force, where the private space is replenished by the scientifically-controlled creation of wealth which is the result of free enterprise and free competition between individuals of any rank and file. Whereto are traditions and religious values in such a mechanized universe? Where hides the soul of a soulless world, the heart of a heartless universe, to paraphrase a famous saying?

Although Alexandru Duțu spoke of the mentalities of a dead world, his outspoken devotion to unfolding the mysteries behind a traditional society that had its own distinctive cultural mark and social cohesion casts a glance of the morphology of modernity that marked the European Eastern lands after the 1820’s. The slow pace of modernization in countries such as Romania had had its consequences and temporarily and partially brought its unintended social havoc to this very day. Finally, out study is meant to illuminate on a dying and fragile culture whose memory had been many times twisted to serve the official speech of the empowered condescending modernizers and, most times, had been forgotten completely or relegated to the dustbin of history. No wounded soul perishes without a last cry of its past existence.

*** Last but not least, questions of the method we chose are quintessential for a thorough on-going examination of any topic in political science. From the very start our study is meant as an exercise in qualitative research35, namely we are highly interested in abstracting recursively the main lines of thought (and their affiliated concepts) in Alexandru Duțu’s works. Therefore, there is no reason to assume that our study is no more than inside the realm of the history of ideas 36. However, we focus on the birth of ideas and their development both as concepts and as wide interpretations of society and history. Since our study is primarily organized around epistemological quarrels in regard to cultural patterns, mentalities, intercultural perspectives, mental constructs, cultural images, we only hope that, paraphrasing C. Wrights Mill37, we

35

John Ziman, Real Science: what it is, and what it means, Cambridge University Press, 2000. Quentin Skinner, The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences, Cambridge University Press, 1990. 37 C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination, Oxford University Press, 1959, see the appendix “On Intellectual Craftsmanship”. 36

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haven’t allowed official public issues and private troubles invade the content of the following pages.

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Chapter 1: An Intellectual Portrait in Retrospect Die Bildung The real biography of writers, the life of their feelings and thoughts, that come primarily prior to the deeds themselves, especially in dire historical circumstances which are the gruesome trademark of the twentieth century, consists in their books rather than in plain autobiographical content (or even, under communism, in sheer reasons for biographical discontent). In the case of Alexandru Duțu, who was in many respects a late-century Romanian polymath in the field of the history of culture, it is exactly this devotion to the life of the books (and also to the enlivening of dead letters) that constitutes his real biography. During many decades and in subsequent books of which he had been the sole author, Alexandru Duțu places great emphasis on the chasm that in pre-modern Orthodox Europe divided the existence of man, a tradition which has important political implications for the fate of the local societies that have been constantly swept through by successive waves of a Western-type modernization beginning in the first half of the nineteenth century: on the hand, the world-from-within (lumea dinăuntru) and, on the other hand, the-outside-world (lumea din afară). By the world-from-within Duțu understood not only the practical and personal concerns of an individual living in a pre-modern society created on the fabric of close tights under the protecting umbrella of an organic community, but also the moral values, the religious beliefs, the truths that an individual shared with other members of the society. The advent of modern industry spelt the doom of the traditional world. “No society could, naturally, live for any length of time unless it possessed an economy of some sort; but previously to our time no economy has ever existed that, even in principle, was controlled by markets. In spite of the chorus of academic incantations so persistent in the nineteenth century, gain and profit made on exchange never before played an important part in human economy. Though the institution of the market was fairly common since the later Stone Age, its role was no more than incidental to economic life.”38

38

Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, Beacon Press, 2001, p. 45.

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These Gemeinschaft39 values were linked to religion and to the sacred conservation of an inherited moral and cultural ethos. To Duțu, the world-from-within, surrounded by the protective walls of the traditional family, was a place from which one gathered moral strength and spiritual energy to strive and hope that existence has a meaning within a symbolic hierarchy: at the top, God and his commands, at the base level, the perpetual cleansing and the sacred aspirations of one’s soul. The world-from-within did not chastise the role and the meaning of the individual. Although for Alexandru Duțu individualism is a pre-Romantic invention designed to grant imagination a higher power over reason – and, implicitly, by consolidating and unleashing the powers of imagination proportionally reducing religion to just a facet cast out of the same material of imagination –, the Romanian scholar keeps on affirming in his articles and essays dating after the fall of communism that there is plenty of open space left for individualism before the onset of modernity in the Romanian lands40. Being part of the chain of being (a Medieval idea to which Arthur Lovejoy is responsible for writing a masterpiece which stands presently as a testimony to the birth of the history of ideas as a separate academic field in the last century41) meant that the limits between which one’s soul could move up or down were as infinite as the presence of God on the upper most step. The ties and the control of the community were delineated by strict theological reasoning and the prospect of spiritually subjugating and controlling the soul of the subject were bordered by the respect to men’s souls which is dogmatically present in the Christian religion as a whole, notwithstanding the various Christian denominations. For Christians, man’s soul has an inner divinely-sparked dignity since man was created from the onset in the image of God. At the same time, the-outside-world corresponds to the duties and obligations one has to the community. These responsibilities, mainly political in their nature, derive from a sense of natural solidarity and care for the worries and perils of one’s peers. The-outside-world followed its unceasing track of inherited customs, deeply rooted traditions, local habits which did not 39

Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Civil Society, Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 15-93. Alexandru Duțu, Lumea dinăuntru și lumea din afară, editura Universității din București, 2009. 41 Alexandru Duțu was one of the first translators of Arthur Lovejoy’s masterwork into Romanian (see Eseu în istoria modelelor umane, editura Științifică, București, 1972, pp. 263-275.) The book was translated later as Arthur Lovejoy, Marele lanț al ființei, editura Humanitas, București, 1997. 40

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interfere with the limits of the inside-world or the world-from-within. Alongside the presence of a vivid intertwining between different social strata, following the lines of a laic, oral and clerical culture, the-outside-world and the world-from-within were to be forever split apart from their interspersed being when Western patters were imported in Eastern Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century, producing, what Alexandru Duțu refers to, an “epistemological breakthrough”. More or less, Alexandru Duțu’s own Bildung stands at the crossroads of the impossible reconciliation between the world of interwar Romania, feebly democratic at first and then, moving into the late 1930s, more authoritarian by the minute, and the totalitarian prison of communist Romania. Alexandru Duțu confesses that he had passed through the bitter decades of the communist period and its “stupidities” (a word often used in his articles after 1989 when generally referring to the Former Regime) trapped in the-outside-world, yet somehow free and reconciled in his world-from-within, filled up with books, close friends, relatives, his family, some of his work colleagues, etc. This dichotomy gave way to open and public acts of inevitable hypocrisy. When the-outside-world has been captured and suffocated by a political regime which strives to encompass the whole society, the world-from-within becomes a stronghold of unrepentant liberties. However, Alexandru Duțu claims he doesn’t ascribe to evading reality in the mists of culture, such as that the suffering and miseries of others around had frequently impressed upon his senses. Nevertheless, in the 1980s Romania, the myth of high culture (and the almost magic mountain it gave birth to), embodied in the works of Constantin Noica 42, produced a school of thinking that believed it could even be a modern Paideia in a ruinous and desolate Communist society. This is also part to a certain extent of what Alexandru Duțu believes to be underlying the need for a world-from-within. Nevertheless, what Alexandru Duțu’s analysis shows is that the modern state, starting in the middle of the nineteenth century and then being radicalized by the hideous Communist avatar, 42

I mention here only in passing the important place occupied in the intellectual debate of the time Gabriel Liiceanu’s book Jurnalul de la Păltiniș, editura Cartea Românească, București, 1983.

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has been only devised to shatter and then alter the local identity of the Romanian society (which is for Duțu, at least at its onset, one large community rather than what a modern understanding of the concept might lead one to believe). Therefore, there was only little place left for the communitarian tights to ever hold together: once the society was shaken up in a top-down fashion by Communist visionaries connected to the dictates of Moscow, the characteristics of the world in which Alexandru Duțu grew and was accustomed to had been swept away by the greed and resentments of the lower echelons which now found themselves under the banner of the most privileged class under the rule of communism: the working class, the proletariat. In fact, to quote an expression belonging to the political scientist and historian Vladimir Tismăneanu43, the red bourgeoisie of the state-ruling nomenklatura switched sides with the former bourgeoisie. For the Alexandru Duțu’s upbringing, the most important element resided in the warm care and respect for an urban education which he received in the family. Alexandru Duțu overstresses the element of “the school of life”, which is partly an education one gets from everyday practice and observation and partly the sense of one’s liberties which stem from within, from the realm of the first years of education, spent in the comfort and protection of the family and its close circle. When the-outside-world is confiscated by the greedy hand of an excessively bureaucratized state, under the sway of an octopus-like Central Committee of the Communist Party, Duțu believes that the potential inscribed in the human nature diminishes to the extreme. Instead, a sort of social depersonalization of responsibility takes control both of man’s inner life and exterior surroundings. It is almost as if by describing the bleak communist society, Alexandru Duțu writes a Kafkian novel with precise historical details. The backbone of Alexandru Duțu’s intellectual development is none other than the backbone of tradition: “In the case of Alexandru Duțu, as well as Roger Scruton, tradition ceases to be comprehended like a museum exhibit, lifeless and irrelevant, in order to be projected into actuality, where the energy of the cultural and religious inheritance generates an optimism

43

Vladimir Tismăneanu, Stalinism pentru eternitate: O istorie politică a comunismului românesc, University of California Press, 2003, trad. rom. Polirom, Iași, 2005 and Democrație și memorie, Curtea Veche, București, 2006.

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which allows for confronting all the maladies and open the horizon of intellectual debate towards a level of the eternal, beyond deconstructions and relativisms.”44 Born in 1928 from a middle class urban family, Alexandru Duțu recalls the years of his childhood spent in the interwar Romania – a period usually exemplified by its colossal cultural effervescence and by its economic accomplishments by many Romanian historians (although there are reasons to be skeptical in regard to an intellectual generation that embraced a locallybred fascism and a period of social development, marked by successive crises and a low level of industrial life, which still leave a lot of reasons to doubt its overall success) – in such tender and nostalgic words, in reference to the daily tempo of the Romanian capital, “It was a city saturated by culture, with exhibitions, concerts, theaters, welcoming cafes.”45 His father was a lawyer and his mother a doctor, which goes to prove that he came from a well-educated middle-class family. One might even dare to say highly-educated, given the general standards of the age and the visible developmental limits of the Romanian society: shortly before the onset of the Second World War, almost 40% of all Romanians were still illiterate or quasi-illiterate, while the urban strata did not engulf more than 20-25% of all the territories of modern Greater Romania. Both statistics are relevant in light of the European average at the time as far as illiteracy and the level of urbanization are concerned, variables which placed Romania at the bottom of the European countries in terms of its level of economic and social modernization in comparative terms.46 Following the aftermath of the World War II, Alexandru Duțu graduated from the University of Bucharest in 1949, specializing in law and letters, a combination which was an inheritance of the “bourgeois” culture before the onset of the communist regime. The interest Alexandru Duțu has showed years after for the works of the classics and for the exemplary moderation of the pre-modern world (especially Anglo-Saxon writers before the start of the Industrial Revolution) probably flourished from this period of intellectual growth

44

Ioan Stanomir, Conștiința conservatoare, editura Nemira, București, 2004, p. 172. Alexandru Duțu, Lumea dinăuntru și lumea din afară, editura Universității din București, 2009, p. 63. 46 I am here highly indebted to Bogdan Murgescu’s brilliant economic history, România și Europa, editura Polirom, 2010. Cf. also Keith Hitchins, Românii, 1774-1866, Ediția a III-a, editura Humanitas, București, 2013, Keith Hitchins, România, 1866-1947, editura Humanitas, București, 1996, Vlad Georgescu, Istoria românilor, Ediția a IV-a, editura Humanitas, București, 1996. 45

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and inner fermentation, keeping in mind that the academic education was deeply humanist and classicist in fields such as the study of languages or literature. Romania had then inherited a generation of Man of Letters, skilled mainly in the austere universities of Central Europe in the first decades of the twentieth century, which had more in common to the philological earnestness and display of dry erudition typical for the nineteenth century exemplary middle-class upbringing. Alexandru Duțu evokes the illuminating influence of some of his professors, mostly cosmopolite individuals who had little in common with the brutalizing commands of the newly-settled communist regime, such as Tudor Vianu (whom Alexandru Duțu recalls in connection to the study of William Shakespeare) or even distinguished foreign itinerant teachers, such as Roland Barthes. The same atmosphere could be encountered also with the professors and scholars whom Alexandru Duțu had the fortune of meeting and learning from at the Law University, most professors having been educated in the democratic principles and respect for the rule of law of the Old Regime, which were to be shaken and then replaced by others in the late 1930s. With the Education Reform of 1948, the symbolic edifices would be cut to the ground and the university personnel were soon to be dismissed and partly disappear into the newly-erected Communist prisons47. The capitalistic past, with all its grievances and shortcomings, had to be reeducated for the newly-envisaged communist society to be properly built. However, even before the Soviet occupation of 1944, the local intelligentsia have showed signs of a weak democratic spirit and a feeble liberalism expressed in its openness to embrace doctrines and ideologies that have demonstrated their ability to shake every limb of the society under the control of a social engineering process, i.e. irrespectively of it being Communist or Fascist48. In 1951, Alexandru Duțu had become a librarian at the Romanian Academy, a position he will hold on to until 1963. In the lapse of time that ensued, Alexandru Duțu had gently relapsed in

47

Lucian Boia, Capcanele istoriei. Elita intelectuală românească între 1930 și 1950, ediția a II-a, editura Humanitas, București, 2012, pp. 296-345. 48 From historical works detailing the far-right Romanian experiment also at the level of the intelligentsia such as Armin Heinen, Legiunea , editura Humanitas, București, 2006, pp. 260-272 to more opportunistic intellectual elites under political pressure in Lucian Boia, Capcanele istoriei. Elita intelectuală românească între 1930 și 1950, editura Humanitas, București, 2012.

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the world-from-within since, as many recent historians on the period have portrayed in the evocations of the decade, the outside-world had turned into a prison cell for any sort of free thinkers (possible opponents of the newly-founded communist society) or any kind of freedom of speech and conscience (deviant and Western inspired). The communist regime at the time had many elements in common with the hardest Stalinist lines and almost all intellectual endeavors in the social sciences or philosophy were stifled or tarnished by the firm grip of the Party’s indications and ideological dictates49. In that particular age, every supposedly socialist virtue had its privileges, one being to deliver its own little bundle of wood to the funeral pyre of the condemned men, the bourgeois, the capitalist exploiter, the man of the old order and of Western rapacity, greed and cultural decadence. The literature on the subject of those wrongly prosecuted, of the uncountable victims and scapegoats of the Romanian Communist Party in its first decade and a half of unquenchable desire for revenge, resentment and punishment has grown in heaps in the last decade and we find no reason to quote an over-abundant testimony of the victims of the first ruthless period of the local Communist totalitarian schemes and means employed to subjugate an entire society, crumble its foundations and kneel it before an international ideology50. Such an awfully hostile climate made Alexandru Duțu, during the 1950s, to retreat into the closed circle of his friends, to find spiritual nurturing in reading, in dialogues and praying. The 1950s are also a time in Alexandru Duțu’s life when he approaches religion and will be forever illuminated by the circle of friends and advisors who met at the Antim Monastery and would

49

Vladimir Tismăneanu, Cristian Vasile, Perfectul acrobat, editura Humanitas, București, 2008, as well as Cristian Vasile, Literatura și artele în România comunistă, 1948-1952, editura Humanitas, București, 2010, Cristian Vasile, Politicile culturale în timpul regimului Gheorghiu-Dej, editura Humanitas, București, 2011, Victor Frunză, Istoria stalinismului în România, editura Humanitas, București, 1990. 50

Intelectualii şi regimul comunist. Istoriile unei relaţii, Polirom, Iași, 2009, Anuarul Institutului de Investigare a Crimelor Comunismului, Elite comuniste înainte şi după 1989, Polirom, 2007, Anuarul Institutului de Investigare a Crimelor Comunismului, Adrian Cioflâncă și Luciana M. Jinga (coord.), Represiune și control social în România comunistă, volumele V-VI, Polirom, Iași, 2001, as well as Vladimir Tismăneanu, Cristian Vasile, Perfectul acrobat. Leonte Răutu, măştile răului, editura Humanitas, București, 2008, Cristian Vasile, Literatura și artele în România comunistă, 1948-1952, editura Humanitas, București, 2010, Cristian Vasile, Politicile culturale în timpul regimului Gheorghiu-Dej, editura Humanitas, București, 2011.

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organize around the Rugul Aprins51 religious group. In the meantime, Alexandru Duțu will be shortly a student at the Orthodox Theological Institute and his education will gain significantly and enrich itself through the presence of a religious inspiration. Beside the fact that Alexandru Duțu was a participant to the meetings and thus befriended personalities such as Dumitru Stăniloaie, Alexandru (“Codin”) Mironescu, Sandu Tudor, Paul Sterian, Vasile Voiculescu, Paul Constantinescu, Alexandru Elian, Ion Marin Sadoveanu, Anton Dumitriu and others, his inner self and the world-from-within will benefit and enrich itself through the lessons and fervent dialogues of the meetings of Rugul Aprins. Before the closing of the decade, Rugul Aprins will be subject to a fearsome official – almost political one might say – attack and the group will disintegrate to such an extent that some of its notable members will end their lives in the prisons of communism and other will choose the road to exile. Alexandru Duțu was spared and his destiny will take on a different path. What was the role played by the community of brothers joined together in Rugul Aprins? Apparently, as Andrė Scrima mentions eloquently in his rich metaphorical display, the group itself had little to pose a threat to the political regime that took control of Romania in the aftermath of the Second World War. “However, politics, formally or diffusively, was the domain least attractive for the Antim Group. If the , close-by or global, was not even glanced at, it was nevertheless a second-rate pretext of a meta-historical reflection, but not an object of political debate. The newly-ended war, for example, sat gloomily, as if by itself, among the events in the twists of the cycle. The ebb and flow of peoples represented the same movements of transgression, destined for the future redeployments. Among other interpretations and meanings, communism could also seem an inevitable, yet lame attempt to extend over some human settlements a pseudo-modernity of a Westerntype origin. Reassured, as if through a planned tropism, of this objective, the communist ideology and practice will find themselves imminently and acutely distanced from the development of the modern mentality, which will push them steadily into a strange contemporary state. We had foreseen all of these: what made us tremble 51

Important sources of hindsight on the historical context are to be found in Daniil Sandu Tudor, Taina Rugului Aprins. Scrieri si documente inedite, editura Anastasia, București, 1999 and Marius Oprea, Adevărata călătorie a lui Zahei, editura Humanitas, București, 2008.

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anxiously was the forced regression, recorded in all the fields of human reality, without the remedy of the obvious aberrations and insufficiencies of the former regimes to be discovered. A new gross-minded class of nouveau riche was making way even in – or especially there – the field of culture. How many generations will be wasted, we asked ourselves with a pang in our hearts, until the critical thinking will become once more alive, rediscovering the exulting meaning of a world open upon its universality?”52 Alexandru Duțu’s articles after 1989 will share the same perspective upon the legacy of the communist past as in the lines of Andrė Scrima. Duțu’s affiliation to Rugul Aprins is, at least from an intellectual point of view, reasonable to state: the same theological education and the same desire to analyze through the means of ideas and mentalities the relationship between Western Europe’s patterns of civilization and the societies and cultures of Eastern Europe before the nineteenth century, when the process of Westernization was gaining full momentum. At the same time, Alexandru Duțu’s almost complete lack of reference to the official ideology (although there is still a subject of academic debate whether there was a genuine state ideology of Marxist inspiration in Romania after 1948 or rather a Soviet-inspired Stalinist leadership in the hands of the single party controlled by a privileged minority) coincides with the stress he puts on prudence, gradualism in state affairs and the separation of state powers in his later life. The kernel of liberalism of this approach is to be sought for in the same period within the Antim group: “All that was happening before, the nightly drama of arrests, interrogations, all kinds of constraints were aiming at breaking down the individual resistance. Power – this is the essential agent. The following determinants – ideology, politics, even “patriotism” – are all disguises. Under their disguise, Power is always forced to check itself, by confronting its sole and enigmatic adversary: consciousness. That which makes the man say: . If we could define the human being outside consciousness, there would not be much left of man: only then Power would rule over a simulacrum of reality.”53 The Ups and Dows of a Scholar at Work Some years later, in 1963, when the cultural and political climate had slightly mellowed, Alexandru Duțu will have joined the team of researchers of the newly-established Institute of South-Eastern European Studies of the Romanian Academy, having proved gifted in the reading and studying of old Romanians classical works, set prior to the nineteenth century, but also having shown a keen eye for literary studies. The Institute had been founded first by Nicolae Iorga in 1914 and had as its main aim to research on the history and the interconnected cultures of south-eastern Europe. In the first half of the 1960s, Mihai Berza would lead the Institute until his death. Other prominent researchers of the institute had been Virgil Cîndea, Paul H. Stahl, Mihai Pop, Alexandru Elian, Nicolae-Şerban Tanaşoca. The Institute is under the tutelage of the Romanian Academy, which had been then a key intellectual element within the communist state itself in its quest of symbolically legitimizing the regime. However, the subjects of the Institute were not contemporary. The pre-modern Balkans were its only relevant topic, together with the various historical exchanges the region had passed through between the Habsburg, Ottoman and Russian Empires. By this time, most of Alexandru Duțu’s personality had been consolidated and his cultural references, as well as his areas of expertise, had also gained enough ground as to form the material of his future books (he will also graduate from the Faculty of Theology in 1970, but his interest in the subject dates back decades early on). It would be worth taking notice that the Institute of South-Eastern European Studies was in its scope and breadth in a mixed relationship with the ideological prescripts of the period and, hence, produced scholarly works that were ambivalent in regard to the question of historiographical methods. Nevertheless, since there is no thorough scholarly study designed to examine the activity of the Institute during the period under discussion, there is no need to engage into quasi-reckless hypotheses. 53

Andrė Scrima, Timpul Rugului Aprins. Maestrul spiritual în tradiția răsăriteană, editura Humanitas, București, 2012, p. 199-200. See also the testimony of Nicolae Steinhardt, Jurnalul fericirii, editura Polirom, Iași, 2008, and the study by George Ardeleanu, ,,Un dosar al memoriei arestate”, pp. 663-705.

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True however is also that by focusing on the world of Byzantium and the Ottoman Empire, the regime might have encouraged the studies of the Institute given that exploring the imagined roots of the Romanian nation was of primary relevance for a communist regime which, by the late 1970s, was showing signs of parochialism, a gross xenophobic nationalism, fascist and isolationist trademarks. Therefore, the Institute was portrayed as a laboratory of ideas and hindsight that could be possibly molded on the whims and dreams of the political elites which had the task of producing mass propaganda and indoctrination in the nationalistic vein. Whether or not the Institute of South-Eastern European Studies confirmed its expectations is debatable, since by employing a comparative method of study and opening to other cultural areas, there was little way by which the late-1970s protochronism54 and the meta-historical narrative of the ancient origins of the Romanians and their connection to the single party could be connected to the heteroclite and hard-to-define work of the Institute at all during the period. This is not an issue which is at stake in the analysis we have undertaken 55. At this point, we reach a point in Alexandru Duțu’s lifespan that comes hard to explain. We believe that the ancient request for sine ira et studio could help much in our present delicate endeavor56. Apostol Stan devotes an entire book to the unbalanced relationship between the social sciences under communism and the biased successful attempts by the official ideology to interfere and control the work of research institutions, publishing houses and even the academic world: history under communism is mostly distorted by the then-present whims of the regime, which might not be the same the next day or in the subsequent years 57. Unfortunately, the histories written under communism are communist histories, even if the ideological position is not dogmatically orthodox from a Marxist-Leninist perspective. In fact, the nationalistic ethos of most Romanian historians after 1964 is hardly attributable to Marxist Leninism or solely to the ideological commands of the regime. It is rather an unfortunate coincidence between two different mindsets, the political and the academic, that share the 54

Alexandra Tomiță, O istorie „glorioasă”. Dosarul protocronismului românesc, București, editura Cartea Românească, 2007. 55 Marius Oprea, Bastionul Cruzimii. O istorie a Securității (1948-1968), editura Polirom, Iași, 2008. 56 Marius Oprea, Moștenitorii Securității, editura Humanitas, București, 2004. 57 Apostol Stan, Istorie și politică în România comunistă, editura Curtea Veche, București, 2010 and De veghe la scrierea istoriei, editura Curtea Veche, București, 2012.

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same organically-embedded idea of the nation, dating back before the 1900s. Consequently, the power of the former secret police (Securitate) is not to be underestimated in the realm of ideas. Dorin Tudoran, the former Romanian dissident who emigrated to the United States in the 1980s, exposes the intricate connections of the Romanian intelligentsia, namely artists, writers, journalists and academics and their affiliation to the Securitatea records, in a lengthy volume58 that is destined not to divide the intelligentsia into two camps, the good vs. the bad, but to shed light on the various types of betrayal and collaboration in a social reality distorted and manipulated by the communist secret police. Lately, Gabriel Andreescu59 writes about the moral perils of judging in absolute terms the personal lives of the Romanian intellectuals who are present in the Securitate files only by the ominous and intrusive work of a secret police in a totalitarian state. There is a risk of taking too seriously into account the testimonies of a manipulative and omnipotent state institution in the former regime and turning it into a moral agent under a democratic regime. Nonetheless, if the devil is cautious in attributing the sinful blame, there is no reason to see morality where there is none. In the CNSAS archives, there are two volumes (no. 313574) consisting of the depositions of the source “Cîmpeanu”, the nickname given by the Securitatea officers to Alexandru Duțu. The first volume consists of around 280 pages, while the second, an annex of depositions, numbers about 250. The date of the first meeting between the Securitate officers and Alexandru Duțu is, in most reports of the first volume, 27 July 1963. The hidden reason of his “interception” was Duțu’s past friendship with members of the already extinct Rugul Aprins. The official excuse is that Alexandru Duțu, in his position as a librarian at the Library of the Academy, had ordered the purchase of religious books with a Biyzantine historical content at the end of the 1950s and, hence, introduced religious material for the sake of his own private reading in a library which belonged to an officialy atheistic progressive state. For the next 27 years, Alexandru Duțu will keep in touch with the agents of the secret police. There are about 140 deposition written by Alexandru Duțu himself and there are also clear indications that he was also the object of the secret police’s interception of letters, telephone tracking and 58 59

Dorin Tudoran, Eu, fiul lor, editura Polirom, Iași, 2010. Gabriel Andreescu, Cărturari, opozanți, documente, editura Polirom, Iași, 2012.

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similar intelligence practices. Although the portrait of the Securitatea officers is not be taken seriously given the infamous character of the institution per se under totalitarianism, Alexandru Duțu stands out as a somehow bygot, solitary narrow-minded little bourgeois, highly educated and extremely gifted as a scholar. He is also hard-working, honest and dilligent in serving the purposes of the officers. What were the challenges posed by the Securitate? Sorrounding all the myths concerning the alleged moral pitfalls of any Securitate files, there are many exaggerations and fabrications. Alexandru Duțu writes most of his reports in the aftermath of any international conference he had been invited and had attended to in the 1970s and 1980s. All the academic visits to the Netherlands, Austria, the United Kingdom or the United States etc. are followed by detailed reports to the Securitate. They do not mention details about the personality or the private lives of the academics he encounters at the conferences, but he does go into depth when writing the summary of the ideas discussed at the conference. Whether mockingly or not, the content of the report has the form of a rigid academic summary of the age. References to colleagues from the Institute or other academic staff have their place in the files as well, but Alexandru Duțu does not ever adopt a personal intimate tone. He is rather objective, distant and cold in his recounts and he cannot be the object of any moralistic post festum witch-hunt. However, at a strictly personal level, if there is a trace of the la trahison des clercs in Alexandru Duțu’s case, that could be attributed to the direct link between the frequency of his “betrayals” to the Securitatea and the opportunity to participate to a foreign conference, which was a social luxury at the time. At a more hermeneutical level, an observation which rings true for all his published works too, Alexandru Duțu shares most, if not all, the nationalistic conundrums of the communist regime after 1970 with the quintessential difference of lacking completely the radicalness and the protochronist vulgarity of other intellectuals caught in the web of the communist society. Since the archives are available for open study, the files belonging to Alexandru Duțu might represent an opportunity for a further analysis, which is not coming even close to the aim of these pages, that is to emphasis and understand the ideas and the historiographical original hindsights of Alexandru Duțu’s scholarly work.

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The Historian and his Contemporaries Therefore, to move on, the long years that will come would be rich in terms of books and articles published by Alexandru Duțu, along with the fabulous chance, under a regime which was per se not in favor of granting its citizens the right to free travel, to experience the joys and the cultural impact of other countries in Europe, mostly in the Western democratic world (as a matter of fact, the subjects of most of Duțu’s academic visits are clearly transparent in the articles which are framed together in books such as Călătorii, imagini, constante and Modele, imagini, priveliști, published in the early 1980s). Alexandru Duțu will always express a deep regard for the academic encounters and exchanges that will mark part of his essays on how relevant political and cultural prejudices are in shaping cross-European mentalities. Many of these small slices of intercultural connections would make the material of one of his last books, focused primarily on the relevance of what is to be European nowadays, when the traditions of each part of the European continent are still a matter of cross-national biases, some of which are reflected in the extent and degree Eastern Europe is portrayed and scientifically comprehended in Western universities. Alexandru Duțu has always been an advocate of cherishing and preserving elements of Europeanism that had been forced out of the fabric of society by the surge of the modernization process started in Central and Eastern Europe with the advent of the nineteenth century in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars 60. Perhaps it is in relationship to the ethos of modernity that Alexandru Duțu’s personality loses its surface layers and one can decipher the core elements of his thinking. Through modernity Alexandru Duțu perceived malignant forces that endangered what he calls “human nature”. The malignity of modernity is best perceived by Alexandru Duțu through a conglomerate of ways of thinking that endanger spiritually and physically not only the human race, but, more precisely, its connections to the past. It is often the case that Alexandru Duțu, in the articles published after 1989, alludes to Brave New World, the famous dystopia by the novelist Aldous Huxley. What Alexandru Duțu saw as a constant threat to the condition of the modern man is the rapid 60

Charles and Barbara Jelavitch, The Establishment of the Balkan National States, 1804-1920, University of Washington Press, 1977 and Barbara Jelavitch, History of the Balkans, vol. I: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, Cambridge University Press, 1983.

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wave of secularization, always destabilizing not only the symbolic edifices of the past, but also the values, the expectations and the psychological characteristic of humankind. The secular order is radical and aggressive with it desires to extirpate and demolish the past by forgetting it, wiping its evidence away or relegating it into museums, antique shops and dusty store rooms, depositors of dead memories. The perpetual fight against traditional religion is one aspect of modernity to which Alexandru Duțu didn’t feel at ease with not even for a bit 61. At the same time and almost as a natural consequence, modernity had striven to duplicate religion’s empty hole by the benevolent prospects of ideologies, materialist and body-focused, which in the nineteenth century gravitated between milder forms, such as positivism or the belief in reason as a tool capable of bringing a new Paradise of material wealth on earth, to more radical versions, having their origin in social Darwinism and finishing in the extermination and work camps of Soviet Russia and the similar racial ones of the Third Reich. Socialism and fascism, together with their multifarious embodiments for each nation and country, have given a mortal blow to the steadiness of religious spirituality, so vivid in earlier generations 62. Therefore, Alexandru Duțu maintained an anti-ideological position all throughout his lifetime and didn’t embrace any –ism or fashion of thinking which made many European intellectuals in the first half of the last century to betray the cause of reason, impartiality and formal logical thinking. Secularism had been turned into a dangerous cultural reductionism. “We believe this dangerous is associated with a mental attitude produced by the laicization of the European culture which has foreseen also in material terms: instead of returning to harmony and Edenic peace, the secularized thinking has put forward purely material criteria seen as capable to give back to man a : the race, the class, the mass. Then, the laicization has brought with

61

Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, Stanford University Press, 1991. For its connection to esthetics and comparative literature, Matei Călinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism, Duke University Press Books, 1987. 62

For the topic of secular religions disguised as political ideologies, see Eric Voegelin, Modernity Without Restraint: The Political Religions, The New Science of Politics, and Science, Politics and Gnosticism, (Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 5), University of Missouri, 1999, especially the first essay.

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itself a narrowing of the concept of ; only what falls under the senses having the attribute of sending concrete, definite and persuasive data: all that goes beyond the contiguous and the substantive has been looked upon with suspicion as a possible source of misleading; of superstition, of . The alienation from God has been justified in social terms; “mysticism” being considered a dangerous phenomenon because it would lead directly to intolerance and fanaticism: it has been affirmed without hesitation that beyond the contiguous there is the anti-social bahaviour.”63 Without confronting the role played by industrialization and the rapid growth of city life in the modern age – particularly keeping in mind that all economic changes between members of a fixed society, according to an inherited rank, trigger a set of shifts in mentalities as well –, Alexandru Duțu rebukes the excesses of consumerism, gross mercantilism, the tendency of modern man to quench its appetites and neglect as much as possible its duties to the spiritual callings of its forefathers. Materialism in itself looks more like a pagan cult of physical prosperity and abundance, set against the prudence, the strivings, the ideals of Old Europe or even against the aspirations which encumbered the American Forefathers. Although the social effects of the post-war turbo capitalism were not social realities that pertained to the Eastern Communist Block, Alexandru Duțu believed that the ludicrous megalomaniacs at the top of every Communist Party were trying to redesign the human psychology in such a way that it fitted the initial plans of these new engineers of the souls. However erroneous, ineffectual and hideous the final outcome turned out to be, the socialist thinking – directed against the foundations of an Old World in order to create the New Utopia – had in common the same promethean godforsaken desire to alter the past in an unrecognizable future present in the United States and Western Europe. The changes that were taking place in the first two decades after 1945 brought about not only a brand new era, but a new mass of people, conformed to similar marketing surveys and experiments. Against this “onedimensional man” (a phrase coined by a famous Leftist philosopher who came from another heritage than that of Alexandru Duțu), tradition and classical education, respect for moral 63

Alexandru Duțu, Lumea dinăuntru și lumea din afară, editura Universității din București, 2009, p. 262

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values could be fruitfully employed. This is not imply that Alexandru Duțu belonged to the strictly anti-modern reactionary camp to which the French Antoine Compagnon64 has dedicated a book in recent years (despite the heterogeneity of its members), but that he fostered a diverse set of social role-models for the young Europeans to come than the ones prescribed by the Communist Party or by the shallowness of a glossy magazine. Living selfishly to gratify one’s senses is a selfless matter. Alexandru Duțu belonged inherently to a society of classes rather that the society of a single-class, be it the vengeful proletariat or the hardworking suburban dwellers of an American megalopolis. Another quintessential subject of debate that attracted Alexandru Duțu’s attention lies in the importance given in the last two hundred years to the administrative control of the state. What the Romanian scholar found extremely jeopardizing for the freedom of conscience and the cultural diversity of a genuine democracy is the steady, but firm empowering of the state. Big government, which decides both social assistance policies, the public health care state of affairs or the average level of education of its citizens suited to economic purposes, triggers the birth of a state that, using an expression employed by Alexandru Duțu from time to time, suffers, more often than not, from “elephantiasis”. What is gruesome in communism is that the state shows so much expediency and ferocity it its actions and so much efficiency in its practices over a given population that, by being spread to every corner of the social body, it seems to have evaporated into thin air. Under communism, political action is supplied by a statistical passion, that of creating numbers, figures, curve bells that hold true for the absent civil society. It is this almost lethal damage to the Romanian society that Alexandru Duțu blames communism for, along with turning the logic of the social classes upside down, e.g. the low-educated being the most privileged, the blue-collar worker having a superior standing to the white collar worker. These circumstances were not decided by pragmatic reasons, but by an ideological hatred set against the supposedly reactionary elements of the old order. If this hadn’t been historical information which could be easily backed up by the testimonies and the living proofs of the age, the whole argumentation above might be wrongly accrued to fantasy and paranoia. 64

Antoine Compagnon, Antimodernii, editura Art, București, 2008.

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“What seems to be a primary need is to drastically reduce the role played by the State in the life of societies, since the State has been contaminated by the modern intellectual and political maladies and has reached forms of elephantiasis which favor and consolidate totalitarian regimes. Any kind of totalitarian regime reduces at the least the organic patriotism, replacing it with a dull and asphyxiating patriotic discourse. Served by tribunes and not by agitators or [party] activists, the State has the duty to ensure civil order, justice, the protection of the country, but not through the means of an “unshakable” unity, but through the consensus accomplished by the diversity of opinions and tendencies. Democracy does not mean unanimity, but respect towards a body of rules mutually accepted.”65 Against the malformations of a social system wherein there is a vacuum of private life and where the state appropriates the individuals, Alexandru Duțu sees no other way than to retreat in the world-from-within. ”Planification, dropping to the minimum of the sphere of the private property, the persistent confrontation with the , and the obsessive invocation of the leap towards the communist society: the socialist/popular democracy is dominated by a promethean ambition of remaking the relations by aggregating the individuals into the community. The corollary of this obligation of fidelity to the liberating credo: identifying the , the perpetual vigilance directed against those suspected of a deficit in their revolutionary consciousness. The exclusion/elimination leads to the complementary sanction of a geographical exile and an inner exile. The division of society is part of the rule of the totalitarian mechanism and the benefits are granted exclusively to those worthy of the party’s trust.”66

65 66

Alexandru Duțu, Lumea dinăuntru și lumea din afară, editura Universității din București, p. 2009, p. 263. Ioan Stanomir, Conștiința conservatoare, editura Nemira, 2004, p. 183.

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The Scholar and History The reasoning above is not directed so as to foster the image of a scholar who had been anticommunist from the very beginning. On the contrary: most of Alexandru Duțu’s accomplished work is situated prior to 1989 and the subjects of his books are placed in pre-modern cultural settings. Even his post-revolutionary articles are not meant as being a theoretical critique of communism, but more as a cultural assessment of the type of society Romanian communism has given birth to. Alexandru Duțu’s standpoint in most of the articles bound together in the volume Lumea dinăuntru, lumea din afară is more inclined in establishing the primacy of old traditions, now lost, then on symbolically taking revenge on the misdeeds and misconceptions of the former regime, more so when the line of tradition to which Alexandru Duțu adheres had been tarnished by a fast-forward modernization process. Nevertheless, there is enough evidence to shortly go over the communist policies concerning the fate of the Romanian intelligentsia during the four decades of the “socialist” Romania and confirm Duțu’s late anti-communist stance: in the period 1948-1953, the intellectual life in Romania (broadly speaking, from the directing of movies to the publishing of books) was passing through a radical change according to a pure Stalinist cultural mindset. The cultural past and the intellectual role-models prior to 1948 (writers, academics, scientists etc.) were eliminated from the public life (most of them, only temporarily). The whole domain of the social sciences and the products of cultural life were fashioned to suit the purposes of the Soviet occupation of the time and of the Communist ideology they favoured. 67 Art and literature were by-products of state propaganda. For the historical period that followed next, the circumstances changed only mildly, but the scenery became less and less homogenous along with the rising influence of the ethnicallydetermined Romanian faction within the Romanian Communist Party (as opposed to the international Soviet faction, mainly originating in Bessarabia and being of Russian and Jewish descent, epitomized in the brief but decisive career of Ana Pauker68): from Stalinist dogmatism 67 68

Cristian Vasile, Literatura și artele în România comunistă, 1948-1953, editura Humanitas, București, 2010. Vladimir Tismăneanu, Stalinism pentru eternitate, editura Polirom, Iași, 2005, pp. 107-173.

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there was a movement towards a nationalistic ethos, a process controlled by the institutions of the state. Censorship was common at the time, but there were also ways of benefitting from the State, especially by the means of prizes and public distinctions.69 It goes without saying that intellectuals schooled before 1948 or who expressed “bourgeois” inclinations had a hard time during the first two decades of Romanian communism, after which a vulgar type of nationalistic propaganda, internalized by an apparently cosmopolitan Party ideology, would rise to prominence and lead the Romanian cultural life right to the days of the very end of the regime. At this point, re-sketching the curriculum vitae of Alexandru Duțu provides us with a fresh overview: after graduating in 1949 (the very beginning of communist control over the Romanian society), he embarks on a long stretch of time in his position as a librarian at the Romanian Academy, the position he will hold until 1963. In the aggressively volatile times of the 1950s, Alexandru Duțu’s biography seems destined for the interior exile of a man of letters distanced from the outside world and its discontents. After 1963, until the fall of the regime, Alexandru Duțu will work at the newly-established Institute of South-Eastern European Studies, under the direction of Mihai Berza, where Duțu will write most of his scholarly articles, studies and future books. Overall, Alexandru Duțu’s connection with the public propaganda machine is null while the connection existing between his work and the political requests of the regime will be later on studied. As Laurențiu Vlad clearly shows in his preface of Lumea dinăutru, lumea din afară, “(…) the research subjects from such an institute would often escape the ideological control, were difficult to introduce into a political scheme, since they either referred to older ages (the Byzantium, the Ottoman Empire etc.), or insisted upon some cultural comparative endeavors which dealt with some favorite topics of the regime, such as, after 1975, the research on the local national movements.”70

69

Cristian Vasile, Politicile culturale comuniste în timpul regimului Gheorghiu-Dej, 1953-1965, editura Humanitas, București, 2011. 70 Alexandru Duțu, Lumea dinăuntru și lumea din afară, editura Universității din București, 2009, p. 13.

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In fact, the topics of Alexandru Duțu’s books are apparently ideologically negligible: slight references to the works of Marx and Engels (to this point, I could not come across any significant reference and I doubt they hold any kind of epistemological relevancy in Alexandru Duțu’s books71), no clear sign of any Marxist historiographical influence (with the only exception of slightly demonizing the role played by empires in controlling and subduing small state unites such as the Romanian Principalities between 1650-1821: nonetheless, this indictment is common to nationalistic historians as well and part of the national mythology too72). However, there are elements in Alexandru Duțu’s texts which have a tendency in support of a nationalistic ethos. At the same time, Alexandru Duțu distinguishes himself furthermore from the prevailing official Marxist Leninist straitjacket by focusing on the history of mentalities and the main ideas circulating in the literate public of the Romanian Principalities before 1821. His main scholarly concern had been the content of the mostly read and often demanded books of the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries and what do these preferences tell about the readers’ habits, intellectual level and education and their standing in society. Alexandru Duțu’s achievement has been to show a deep continuity between the local elites, their subjects (the peasant mentality expressed through the folklore) and the waves of ideas that were coming from Western Europe (via northern Italy, the Habsburg Empire, the territory of modern Greece and even post-1789 France) in the stretch of two centuries, long before the Romantic nationalistic ideals of the 1848 Romanian generation would swipe away the past as unfittingly feudal and backward for the new Romanian nation, verbally modeled after Western patters of course. 71

The only quantitatively significant mentioning of the ideas of Marx and Engels I could come across is in the preface to the book belonging to George Coșbuc, Despre literatură și limbă, editura de Stat pentru Literatură și Artă (ESPLA), 1960, pp. 3-27, in which one could read passages, written in the ideologized language of the time, such as, “Într-un moment în care în fața avântului mișcării muncitorești și a creșterii nemulțumii maselor țărănești forțele reacționare se regrupau...” (p. 4) or “Încercînd să apere tezele sale, Coșbuc minimalizează rolul factorului social în elaborarea legendelor și comite eroarea principială a cercetărilor mitologiei populare care, după cum arată Engels, nu și-au dat seama că figurile fantastice, în care se reflectau la început forțele naturii, au devenit cu timpul reprezentante ale forțelor istorice...” (p. 23) The subject of the connection between the nationalistic political agenda in the 1960s Romania and the communist ideology had also direct implications in folklorism, but this is not a matter to be addressed in the course of the following study. 72 Lucian Boia, Istorie și mit în conștiința românească, ediția a III-a, editura Humanitas, București, 2006, pp. 254258.

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The Historical Methodology Where would Alexandru Duțu look for sources of inspiration when discussing the issue of methodology? There is no such thing as a historian without preferences for certain methods of studying history or at least influences and hindsight stemming from the works of other historians. Since the Romanian intelligentsia had been largely influenced by the French language and culture, Alexandru Duțu’s method of analyzing the publishing, the spread and the readership of books is similar to the studies of two French historians of the twentieth century, both members of the Annales73. One of them is Robert Mandrou, who also shows up with an article in one of Alexandru Duțu’s books, Dimensiunea umană a istoriei74 and who is partially responsible for studying the mentalities of the French people by looking at the books that circulated and were read widely in the lower echelons of rural France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Unfortunately, there is no book by Robert Mandrou translated into Romanian so far. The second historian who dwelt upon the subjects of the history of books, publishing and reading in the Anciėn Regime is Roger Chartier, another distinguished historian of the Annales, who also figures throughout the translations in Alexandru Duțu’s abovementioned book75. Roger Chartier’s main interest is finding a connection at the level of ideas, fashions and human conducts which are directly linked to the content, display, publishing houses, printing techniques and common ways of interpreting the books read by the French population in the seventeenth and eighteen centuries. In Roger Chartier’s own words:

“Conversely, any work inscribes within its forms and its themes a relationship with the manner in which, in a given moment and place, modes of exercising power, social configurations, or the structure of personality are organized. Thought of (and thinking of himself or herself) as a demiurge, the writer none the less creates in a state of dependence. Dependence upon the rules (of patronage, subsidy, and the market) that define the writer's

73

Paul Veyne, Writing History: Essays on Epistemology, Wesleyan, 1984, Fernand Braudel, On History, University of Chicago Press, 1982, Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, Vintage, 1964. 74 Alexandru Duțu, Dimensiunea umană a istoriei, editura Meridiane, București, 1986, pp. 241-253 75 Ibid., pp. 253-283.

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condition. Dependence (on an even deeper level) on the unconscious determinations that inhabit the work and that make it conceivable, communicable, and decipherable.”76

A few lines below, Chartier adds that:

“The essential game is being played elsewhere, in the complex, subtle, shifting relationships established between the forms (symbolic or material) proper to works, which are unequally open to appropriation, and the habits or the concerns of the various publics for those works.”77

The same approach is put to good use by Alexandru Duțu in his works on the pre-modern literature (in the broadest sense) of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Romanian Principalities. It goes without saying that although Alexandru Duțu’s writings on the literature of pre-nineteenth century Romanian lands are an effortful array of books (such as Coordonate ale culturii românești în secolul XVIII, Cărțile de înțelepciune în cultura română, Sinteză și originalitate în cultura română or Umaniștii români și cultura europeană, Cultura română în civilizația europeană modernă), the richness and the diversity of the books under survey cannot compare to the French case, namely because the circulation and the number of books were confined to a certain restricted social group (the local boyars and the clergy) and that the books on demand were mainly connected to the interests of the same classes, whereas in the case of France the social dynamism and the prevalence of a well-established hierarchy of social classes even in urban areas makes the array of books more diverse, both in content and at the level of changing otherwise disconnected mentalities. Nonetheless, to assess the similarity of method and observation between what Roger Chartier has written on the topic of French reading of books and the works illustrated by Alexandru Duțu, the Romanian scholar puts together part of his reasoning, aims and assumptions at the beginning of one his mature works:

76 77

Roger Chartier, The Order of Books, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 1994, Preface X-XI. Ibid.

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“The written accounts left behind by an age can become the object of multiple interpretations: one can concentrate on the text itself, in order to catch up with the development of certain linguistic characteristics, to shed light on the literary values and to reveal philosophical expressions; the analysis might give preference to historical circumstances which have helped the emergence of a new set of works; it can also suggest enquiring over an individual work. Irrespective of the viewpoint adopted, the research constantly signals out the sources at hand, the places passed-through by the foreign works that have inspired the authors or that have bolstered translators to transpose them into a new language. All these interpretations insist upon the creation of the work, often providing data about their spreading. Any genuine history of a written culture indicates the life of the works; the published books go along the waves of time, keeping up to the present, disappearing and reappearing at different intervals or sinking forever in the whirlpool of oblivion. This subtle mechanism, once rebuilt, can evoke the evolution of taste, the transformation of mentalities, the intimate drives of social psychologies.

But the interpretation can move beyond the memory of the successive relationships which are established between a piece of work and its public in time, by referring to social structures, namely the case in which it consciously sets to analyze the written evidence as expressions of certain mental structures. Organized chronologically and, as much as it was possible, quantitatively, the published sources and the manuscripts are questioned to disclose all that they contain in regard to the concerns of the people who wrote and read them, to their spiritual moods, to their ambitions, to their viewpoints about the world and the society. From this angle, the works reflects the author’s mentality, as well as the group he is part of and the readers he addresses; the work is once again by the successive generations which rediscover in the summoned creator a author, able to bear their aspirations. The assimilation of foreign elements is merged with the individual and collective representations of some grand-scale cultural movement and these are articulated into currents of ideas, energizing spiritual moods with a high impact in the life of societies. In certain stages, the written accounts turn out to be tightly linked to figurative or 51

oral testimonies; together they lead the way of the researcher into the turmoil of social groups and allow him to perceive the psychological reasoning of some certain aspects of cultural dialogue. The content of the works and the whole details which speak about their existence offer, from such a perspective, precious information in understanding the psychological life of the people in the past. Micro-history makes way to the analysis of the longue durée, whereas the interiorizing of cultural history facilitates the study of the stages covered by .”78

Hence, there would be no exaggeration in claiming that Alexandru Duțu had tried and indeed succeeded in becoming a historian of Robert Mandrou or Roger Chartier type (although the two come from different generations of the Annales), but working on the cultural heritage of one territory in South-Eastern Europe. His methodology, centered on the study of mentalities and cultural changes at the level of ideas expressed in the written literary records of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’ Romanian lands, belongs, at least methodologically, to the most influential school of writing history in France in the first two decades after 1945.

“To transcend the event means transcending the short time span in which it is set, the time span of the chronicle, or of journalism – the brief moments of awareness whose trace give us such a vivid sense of the events and lives of the past. It means asking it over and above the passage of events, there is not an unconscious, or rather a more or less conscious, history which to a great extent escapes the awareness of the actors, whether victors or victims: they make history, but history bears them along.”79

Another significant contribution in the intellectual Bildung of Alexandru Duțu has been his familiarization with the field of comparative literature, which was receiving more and more scholarly attention in the aftermath of World War II. As a student in philology, Alexandru Duțu was acquainted with the domain and many of the future books are inspired more or less by the 78

Alexandru Duțu, Sinteză și originalitate în cultura română, editura Enciclopedică Română, București, 1972, pp. 5-

6. 79

Fernand Braudel, On History, University of Chicago Press, 1982, p. 67.

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ideas and the aims of the academic field of comparative literature80. His debut work, entitled Shakespeare in Romania: A bibliographical essay81 tracks down all the instances in which the local intelligentsia, from the onset of the Romantic age to the postwar period of Duțu’s contemporaries, have translated, debated, dramatized, interpreted and even internalized Shakespeare’s wide and deep legacy in Europe. The German influences, as well as the Romantic vogue for Shakespeare, were decisive for assembling the image of Shakespeare in Romania that will dominate the minds of the local intellectuals and artists long after the close of the nineteenth century.

Alexandru Duțu’s interest regarding the extent and the means through which English culture had been instilled in a country where, as Pompiliu Eliade had almost too much demonstrated in his well-known classical work82, the French culture held sway in every area of public life, is obvious by the presence of a chapter in Cărțile de înțelepciune în cultura română83, in which Duțu shows that the only works translated from English by Greek intermediaries expressed the local admiration for the British “civility”, that is how the British ruling classes behaved in public places or what were their domestic manners, habits or moral principles. The Romanians of the time, not really different from their Greek, Serbian or Bulgarian counterparts, were rather looking for a “didactic literature”, in which the English values were self-evident in the types of highly-esteemed personalities they put forward as a civilized, enlightened example for the rules of behavior a young boyar should uphold in his education and public outlook84. The quest for an exemplary personality was the reason behind Lord Chesterfield’s renown with his Letters to his Son (it circulated under the name of The Oeconomy of Human Life) in the Romanian Principalities, while the respect for the British “common sense”, the ideal of the gentleman, the 80

René Wellek, Austin Warren, Teoria literaturii, Editura pentru Literatură Universală, București, 1967, René Wellek, Conceptele criticii, editura Univers, București, 1970 or Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, Editura pentru Literatură Universală, București, 1967. 81 Alexandru Duțu, Shakespeare in Romania. A bibliographical essay, National Commission of the RPR for UNESCO: editura Meridiane, Bucharest, 1964. 82 Pompiliu Eliade, Influența franceză asupra spiritului public din România, editura Institutul Cultural Roman, București, 2006. 83 Alexandru Duțu, Cărțile de înțelepciune în cultura română, editura Academiei, București, 1972, pp. 156-162. 84 In respect to the changes in tastes and behavior across Europe between the feudal and the modern worlds, see Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, Blackwell Publishing, 2000.

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technological and scientific progress, the bourgeois newspaper were also realities that the Romanian elites were aware of at the threshold between the feudal world and the new engulfing wave of Western modernization in the first decades of the nineteenth century.

The subject of the English models of personalities is again addressed in Eseu în istoria modelelor umane, where the legacy of Lord Chesterfield, John Locke, Alexander Pope or Joseph Addison is once more seen into, more specifically their contribution to the question of how is a civilized, educated man to look like according to the British eighteenth century mindset and how this model had already had a vivid depiction of the English civilization in the age of enlightenment.

“In the eighteenth century, after it had moved through a period of profound crisis, which brought up to discussion one of the most important issues of social life, the British society enjoys a period of stability and general bloom at all levels. Two human qualities are often called out: social decency and mental discipline. Every member of the society was demanded to learn how to respect each other, to contribute to the island’s solidarity, to understand others, to control his impulses, to adapt himself to the general consensus that denies the personal drive to propose all-encompassing solutions to life. Between uniformity and radical individualism the tolerance that accepts diversity, but does not allow for constraint, had been discovered.”85

From these mental patters the ideal of the gentleman will spring up, which will also be the object of interest of many European national elites, including, as Alexandru Duțu has showed by the titles translated from English in South-Eastern Europe, the Romanian ruling elites at the turn of the centuries. The same willingness to look into the cultural interchanges between Great Britain and Romania in a period closer us is easily identifiable in Alexandru Duțu’s later books86, which goes to expose the solidity and the durability of the overall studies of mentalities across different cultural heritages in Europe. 85

Alexandru Duțu, Eseu în istoria modelelor umane, editura Științifică, București, 1972, p. 214. Alexandru Duțu, Modele, imagini, priveliști, editura Dacia, Cluj-Napoca, 1979, more precisely the chapter referred to is “Perceperea reciprocă: relații intelectuale româno-engleze în perioada interbelică”, pp. 112-137. 86

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But perhaps the most available proof of the symbolic debt the larger domain of the history of mentalities owes to the discipline of comparative literature is Alexandru Duțu’s book Literatura comparată și istoria mentalităților. It is more a theoretical work than a precise neat study on a given number of books from a short historical period, out of which the main lines and conceptual frames of the mentalities at work are being brought to the surface by the historian, i.e. Coordonate ale culturii românești în secolul XVIII, Cărțile de înțelepciune în cultura română, Sinteză și originalitate în cultura română, Umaniștii români și cultura europeană, Cultura română în civilizația europeană modernă. However, this is the tool kit of Alexandru Duțu’s overall interpretation of pre-Romantic Romanian culture, the late-feudal slightly-modernized social fabric of the eighteenth century. If one were to comprehend the reasoning behind the abovementioned works, this is the book that guides the whole hermeneutical effort of Alexandru Duțu in his reconstruction of the mental structures and attitudes to morality, religion, economy and society in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Were one to look closely to the divisions in use when writing about history, it would be obvious that Alexandru Duțu pays attention first of all to the dichotomy of orality-written accounts in the same place with the Braudelian-inspired division87 of event-longue durée.

“Moreover, the relationship between orality and the written records cannot be considered as a superior-inferior relationship, but rather a relationship between distinct cultural forms. It has been observed, at this point, that the oral literature, in comparison to the written literature, is synchronous and that although the literary text enjoys a level of autonomy and a constancy that is unknown to the oral works, it needs to be perpetually updated by the individual reader.”88

87

Fernand Braudel, On History, University of Chicago Press, 1982 and Fernand Braudel, Civilization & Capitalism th th 15 -18 Century, The Structures of Everyday Life, Harper & Row, Publishers, New York, 1979, pp. 23-29. 88 Ibid.

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Alexandru Duțu is both an opponent of the opinion that following Gutenberg’s revolution the status of the author has suddenly been changed from the ground (only after the Enlightenment and in the presence of Romanticism does individualism turns into a collective belief) and to the hierarchy fostered by the literate urban-dwellers living in the proximity of the Royal Court set against the illiterate masses of the rural close worlds. There are cultural levels where orality and scriptural records intertwine to a certain respect without having to be at all conscious of the entire process – the more homogenous is the society, the closer to each other are the oral and the written spheres. Yet, there is also a relationship between temporal levels at stake: on the same inhabited territory there were (and, generally, there still are) communities that are prone to the urban life, commerce, literacy, elaborate artistic forms inspired by a cultural and economic elite and others which live according to another tempo: mainly oral, confined to passing on old customs and traditions, technologically lacking the modern refines of the city guilds and producing works of folkloric dimensions89.

Whereas the event has been the offspring of the city, the patriarchal longue durée is more consistent in the rural areas, which before the outbreak of the Industrial Revolution have dominated most European lands, from the Atlantic to the Black Sea. The relationship between the cultural and temporal levels is tackled carefully by Alexandru Duțu:

“In a culture like the Romanian one, in which the longue durée had a significant role, the popular folk literature books have been on the exterior circle of preoccupations, in relationship to the books which have preserved the truth, inscribed on an interior circle; it is the relationship between and the that is to be found in the Byzantine culture, as well as in other traditional cultures. Following the destiny of these books in the Romanian culture allows for a better knowledge of the ways in which the field of the imaginary has developed, but also of the way in which orality and,

89

On the question of the epistemological differences, Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division, 2011.

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implicitly, the public have changed the structure and the style of books belonging to the common European culture.”90

The collective mentality is present in the oral literary genres both in the choice of the genre itself and in the elaboration of the theme and its direct ethical implications.

“Finally, the play between innovations and constants lead us to the understanding of the means through which the imaginary has gone through several changes and how images have evolved. Because the historical perspective allows us to understand that the imaginary did not always possess the same content and the same cultural function, as the images did not always convey the same intellectual realities. The researches which go under the mental surface of literary, artistic and musical works reveal that art has had a special function in the ancient world, the Middle Ages, in the Renaissance or at present, in the same way the image has spoken about principles, about the unknown, about the cognitive capacities of imagination, about a universe in a new shape. The comparison of literary works might signal varieties of a mental structure when it observes synchronous phenomena, or transformations going on in structures, when the phenomena are diachronic.”91

Alexandru Duțu emphasizes the fact that by analyzing the attitudes and the mental representations from all sorts of artistic productions, the ideological system, the system of values, the mental structure from society to which the author, the painter or the composer have belonged, the shift from one set of cultural mentalities to another becomes detectable in the fabric of time.

Another mental structure organized as a dichotomy is the Byzantine one (already mentioned) of the and the , which for Duțu develops along the lines of two kinds of wisdom, defined as distinct reading techniques: the wisdom from-within is 90 91

Alexandru Duțu, Literatura comparată și istoria mentalităților, editura Univers, București, 1982, p. 71. Alexandru Duțu, Modele, imagini, priveliști, editura Dacia, Cluj-Napoca, 1979, p. 74.

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basically determined by an intensive reading of books. In other words, it means that in traditional cultures the reader had in mind the internalizing of the content, moral and philosophical of any given book. Therefore, reading had an implicit practical outcome: that of elevating and deepening the reader’s personality. It was both a spiritual act in the direction of the past (by honoring the traditions that predate you) and of the future: to climb the ladder of a spiritual anagogic accomplishment through the mind, the body and the heart. On the other hand, the wisdom one gained from an extensive reading of books meant otherwise: it had an exterior outcome, that of manipulating information and using it in practical day-to-day occurrences. It is obviously the type of “reading” all modern school curricula teach. However, what Alexandru Duțu favors is not a predominance of the former over the latter, nor does he advocates the role of wisdom from-within under modern and even postmodern circumstances, but the acceptance of the former type of reading, typically employed under the auspices of a traditional society, as genuine as the latter and not as a anachronic futile non-scientific mental pattern of traditional mentality – the standard case.

The third element which receives considerable attention from Alexandru Duțu is constituted in the topic of structures – or the mental kit. To Duțu:

“The images from a text or a figurative language direct us towards the meanings when we attempt to find out through them how those who wrote and read that text or those who communicated to one another through that figurative language were imagining the world and man. The world has a center which is the place man is mostly attached to, either because it is the place that has an exceptional significance for everybody’s life or because it is the place he is organically connected to, the homeland. The world has also an area in which the beholder and the reader feel like at home, being the region with familiar signs which the civilized man will consider , separating it from the region where those who use other signs dwell, i.e. the . In the same fashion, man looks to live his life by conforming to a model of humanity, the one that attracts him and his contemporaries, naturally, given that he does not wish to live randomly, in which case one’s 58

intelligence is less present in daily matters. These meanings can be collected from the places in which the writer or the painters refer to as the universe, to Europe, to the Pacific islands or to the knight who puts his courage to test for those who suffer from injustice. Hence we briefly deduce the mental surroundings of a work. But to perceive the collective mentality that the painter or the writer express in their own way we need to move further away, passing through three stages. They are the three stages of the attitude towards the present.”92

Alexandru Duțu moves on to show that the first level concerns the presentation of the present by unanimously accepted signs, the second is settled on the relationships between the visible and the invisible “because the physical activity is not defined anymore by the objectives it had set, but also in relationship to the meditation it guides or even replace.”93 On the third level we are faced with the signs that portray the essence and in which the “daily life has been sublimated”94 since all objects in the background are in fact symbols, concepts and even myths. All of these apparently disparate elements turn into reasonable frames of reference when we will delve into the proper historical contribution of Alexandru Duțu’s study of mentalities. Consequently, other epistemological pillars of his work need to be addressed here. An important role is attributed to role of climate, which is how the mentalities of different people in Europe have been shaped by the early modern interactions between them: ambassadors, merchants, travelers have been responsible for the first deciphering of what the “Other” stands for and, hence, have put together a display of mutual-inclusive mentalities: once Napoleon’s troops were roaming the territories of Central Europe, the spread of the Republican model and, even more relevant in the context, the model of civilization against barbarity (expressed as economic and intellectual backwardness) had entered slowly but decisively into the vocabulary of the literate classes of Eastern Europe.

92

Ibid., p. 112 Ibid., p. 113 94 Ibid., p. 113 93

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There are enough testimonies, recorded by Alexandru Duțu as well, of the multiple associations between the civilized West, the ever-present pinnacle of “civilization” and of an “enlightened” public culture, and the oppressed and pillaged “young” nations of the East, deprived of the knowledge of their civil liberties and mainly isolated from the lucrative economic and scientific activities of Western Europe – at the helm of the global “wheels of commerce” in the century which Alexandru Duțu’s has chosen as a fitting model for the spread and change of mentalities along the banks of the Danube after existing Budapest. “Therefore, in the moment in which the historian will observe the accelerated rhythm of translations, of commentaries on general issues, an insistence upon critical thinking, he will understand that he is in front of a process of intensified cultural exchanges. In that very moment a series of key images and concepts for the whole system of thinking from the culture currently being studied will have begun to be altered. Starting with the image of the “Other”, the historian can notice how changes are being made and in what way a cultural structure starts to modify by favoring the contacts with other cultures, which not long before were placed under the labels of indifference and contempt. By following on the interfering changes in the cultures which are now given more attention to, he will detect how the cultural climate is designed and how literary exchanges are becoming intense.”95 Another core element is how imagination configures all these concepts in one knitted whole. By imagination and the imaginary Alexandru Duțu has in mind the representation and imitation of reality in culture, a symbolic account of everyday life, largely similar to the concept of mimesis in the work of the literary critique and historian Erich Auerbach. It is not external objects that count, but the meanings and layers of impressions that are ascribed to them. The spread or the creation of certain styles in literature or architecture pertains to fundamental mental structures of the civilization which contains them. “Comparative literary research states that in the field of the imaginary there are mental representations which encourage communication, as there are others that block intellectual

95

Ibid., p. 151

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dialogue. Under these terms we can explain the character of the Romanian literature at the onset of modernity, when the imagination had been set free from the constraints of rhetoric. Such explanations introduce us to the core of the phenomena, while the positivist theories speak about the arduous passion for with other cultures, while the elitist ones ignore the folk popular culture and minimize it in order to exalt the dramatic work of some French poet of the Royal Court. The transformation occurring within the imaginative function and the new content of the mental representations, of the metaphors, provides us with an explanation for the intense communication of the Romanian culture with those European cultures which until that date have been themselves in a mental framework distinctly organized that the one available in the Romanian culture. The mental development of the Western societies and of the southeastern European ones is a way of explaining the intense cultural exchanges in the Romantic age. While in the Western cultures imagination had gradually departed from the hegemony of memory and intelligence, in the explorations of the Renaissance and of the Baroque, in the south-eastern European cultures imagination became central in rhetorical exercises (some fostered by the baroque discourses of Loredano) or in the exercises on fictive subjects (argumenta).”96 Alexandru Duțu moves on to argue that the mental development is to be tracked down and spotted easily in “the literature of enjoyment” (destined for the laymen) at the close of the eighteenth century – that is the classification of the genres speaks better about the changes at the level of imagination: legendary (fabulae), historical (historiae) and fictions (argumenta)97. Last but not least in our endeavor of assembling the main lines of Alexandru Duțu’s intellectual projects is to identify his revision of the systems of signs and values in the cultures of southeastern Europe98. Duțu’s assumption is that most historiography on the subject highlights -

96

Ibid., p. 187

97

Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. I: the Renaissance, Cambridge University Press, 1978 and Visions of Politics, Vol. 2: Renaissance Virtues, Cambridge University Press, 2002. 98

Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Simon & Schuster, 2011.

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which is an attested fact - the consequences of the interaction between the closed world of south-eastern Europe and the movements of ideas from Western societies: the main consequence being the start of the modernization process in the East, copied after the Western model. Alexandru Duțu agrees to the intellectual stagnation typical of the post-Byzantine order in the region, but the transformations the mental pattern have undergone cannot be the sole consequence of a transfer of culture, of imported ideas injected into a cultural corpse. Duțu takes a closer look not only at the amount of translations taking place before the nineteenth century, but also at the literature borne in the same cultures that absorb, through the available means of communication, Western values and mindsets. As Duțu clearly states as a warning to shallow research, he proceeds in his study to prove the allegations he firmly believed in: “The south-eastern European cultural contacts with the others cultures of the continent have been diverse both at the level of the relationship between tradition and innovation and at the level of the written-oral culture: there are have been plenty instances of taking over traditional traits from Western Europe, as well as a rich intellectual exchange at the level of oral communication, especially after the seventeenth century.”99 Whereas by acculturation there is too much credit given to the transfer of ideas, values and mentalities, the intercultural dimension on Western-Eastern divide has been the cradle of future diversity and original civilizational designs.

99

Ibid., p. 225

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Chapter 2 - Alexandru Duțu and the history of ideas The East under Leftist eyes One of the most scathing remarks often made by Marxist thinkers and historians when approaching the subject of the modernization process100 in the economically peripheral countries of late-feudal Central and Eastern Europe101 after the eighteenth century102 is that the intellectual energy fueled into subjects such as the question of language and the creation of the national literature contributes to the creation of a public sphere which is literature-focused and that does not give way to enough space of reasoning to more important issues such as economy, political science and even “political economy”. To Marxists, the much revered status of literature is either a sign of a bourgeois society which is beginning to acquire a class consciousness of its own in the guise of social clubs (and hence build a public sphere with its own traditions and symbols) or yet another hint that a society which is organized by a literature-centered elite is set to stay backward since other professionalized opinions, shaped by the development of the newly-established social sciences in the late nineteenth century, are not to interfere with the rigid and stagnant status quo mindset and its systems of political and economic valuation. The only apparent concern of eastern European political and cultural elites in the nineteenth century was to sluggishly imitate Western cultural patterns in the spirit of chauvinistic and nationalistic values, heralded by an age of Romantic poets and writers who would later on be enlisted in the national pantheon. “In the nineteenth century virtually all the Central and Eastern European elites developed strong nationalist ambitions, that is, a desire to establish strong states under their control. They took as their ideals the strong Western countries, large or small, which seemed able to

100

John Torrance, Karl Marx’s Theory of Ideas, Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 362-394 and Hal Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, volume 1 State and Bureaucracy, Monthly Review Press New York and London, pp. 464-484, pp. 572-591 and for a critical overview Robert C. Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx, Cambridge University Press, 1972. 101 For the historical economic precedence of the West and the role of the medieval Commercial Revolution, see Georges Duby, The Early Growth of the European Economy, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York, 1976 and the classical study by Henri Pirenne, Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe, Mariner Books, 1956. 102 Barrington Moore Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World, Penguin University Books, 1974, pp. 413-433.

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survive and thrive as independent nation-states. As the Eastern European countries gained independence in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries they built their own bureaucracies, armies, and school systems. They hoped to achieve economic growth as well because this was so obvious a part of national strength. They all became, to a greater or lesser extent, somewhat amusing imitators of Western Europe, and the object of mockery for this in the West, much as the posturing diplomats and presidents of the small new states of the Third World are still viewed by all Europeans, Western or Eastern.”103

Apparently, the public sphere was, following the classic analysis of Jürgen Habermas, in the world of letters not by itself bourgeois.

“The bourgeois avant-garde of the educated middle class learned the art of critical-rational public debate through its contact with the . This courtly-noble society, to the extent that the modern state apparatus became independent from the monarch’s personal sphere, naturally separated itself, in turn, more and more from the court and became its counterpoise in the town. The was the life center of civil society not only economically; in cultural-political contrast to the court, it designated especially an early public sphere in the world of letters whose institutions were the coffee house, the salons, and the Tischgesellschaften (table societies). The heirs of the humanistic-aristocratic society, in their encounter with the bourgeois intellectuals (through sociable discussions that quickly developed into public criticism), built a bridge between the remains of a collapsing form of publicity (the courtly one) and the precursor of a new one: the bourgeois public sphere.”104

The above-mentioned left oriented historiography, seen from the perspective of the cultural histories of Alexandru Duțu, seems not to be diffident in regard to the history of the region

103

Daniel Chirot (editor), The Origins of Backwardness in Eastern Europe. Economics and politics from the Middle Ages until the Early Twentieth Century, University of California Press, 1991, p. 11 104 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1991, pp. 29-30.

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before the strong Western influence which followed only after the trade routes with Central Europe have been opened in the late 1820s and the influx of goods came together with the cultural mentalities they brought from the “civilized West”. In fact, seemingly contradicting the cultural histories written by Alexandru Duțu during his lifetime, there is apparently no literature worthy to be analyzed and preserved before the literary output of a generation of Romantic politicians, statesmen, diplomats, and, last but not least, national poets and writers, who, in the footpaths of the cultural and economic impact of Western patters, went to study in the modern European metropolis of the time, namely Paris or Vienna, and brought with them not only an age of newly-established cultural fashions, but also the classifying of the pre-modern literature as feudal and belonging to a resolute period of national history.

“In the first decades of the century, the pursuit of higher education in the West (mostly in France and Germany, much less often in England or Italy) also became standard procedure for Hungarians, Romanians, and Poles. Young aristocrats pioneered this kind of experience, and played a decisive role in disseminating reform and progressive ideas in their countries of origin.”105

The whole generation of “amusing imitators” has created the modern national state of Romania and was willing to supply it with a modern economy as well. There was, however, a local literature in the Romanian Principalities long before the fashions of the West gave way to a generation of talented literary “imitators”. In the national Romanian historical imaginary, what had once been the culture and the traditions of the medieval states turned into the oriental Otherness from the point of view of the westernized political elites.

The so-called absence of the social sciences in the consolidation of the state in the European East, including Romania, could be attributed, on the one hand, to the lack of any modern

105

Virgil Nemoianu, Imperfection and Defeat. The Role of Aesthetic Imagination in Human Society, CEU Press, Budapest, New York, 2006, p. 104 (pp. 91-127).

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institutional traditions in an area still dominated by economic agrarian backwardness 106 and lack of social differentiation and, on the other hand, to the social sciences themselves, which were still gaining scientific importance and respectability in the period. At the same time, since the modernization of the Romanian lands has been a top-down social enterprise, the dynamism of the local boyars in the first half of the nineteenth century does not contradict the conservative and organic fabric of the society below their ranks. In fact, the process of modernization107 would be slowed down and probably even halted at some points when the local elites have showed to be detached from the rank-and-file peasants or city-dweller108.

In the land of “invented traditions” the chasm dividing the generation of Romantic revolutionaries and the obliterated past is set by Western standards: nationalism and a strong centralized state are summoned to widen the gap forever, at least as the writing of history is concerned. In this sense only, the process of imitation is somewhat comic, when the history of the real people, above (or below) and beyond the elitist credo, is fit according to the reformist whims of most local Western educated elites.

If we were to take seriously Habermas’ understanding of what stands for the origin of the public sphere, the local nobility came to regard themselves as elements of bourgeois modernity only after they have been exposed to the “elegant world” of great European cultural and economic centers. There were no solid courtly manners to learn from (except the already repudiated Ottoman courtly manners), but it was the direct impact of the coffee house and salons, together with the city-life of European cosmopolitan metropolis, which shaped the modern thinking of the Romanian elites after 1840. There was indeed a bridge built between the lost Oriental elites and the new ones, who refashioned history according to Western 106

For a statistical analysis of the importance of the Industrial Revolution in the development of capitalism worldwide, Paul Bairoch, Economics and World History, The University of Chicago Press, 1993, pp. 101-109, Robert William Fogel, The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700-2100, Cambridge University Press, 2004, Lenard R. Berlanstein (editor), The Industrial Revolution and Work in Nineteenth Century Europe, Routledge, 1992. 107 For an all-encompassing study on the subject of modernity and the modernization process, see Ronald Inglehart, Christian Welzel, Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy: The Human Development Index, Cambridge University Press, 2005. 108 For the socio-political radical changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution in the developed West, see the classic work by Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, Beacon Press, 2001, pp. 35-136.

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Romantic ideals, mostly French radical liberalism and only slightly the British liberal conservative values – the latter having gained roots in a social context radically different from the Anglo-Saxon case.

The leftist approach to the cultural relevance of semi-peripheral and peripheral societies (in terms of the capitalist world system depicted by Immanuel Wallerstein 109, i.e. as Western Europe has proved to be for the Eastern hinterlands when the Ottoman Empire was on the course of its economic decline) is misguided by taking too seriously the sole paradigm of the liberal elites in spreading and enforcing the Western reformist principles. The leftist critics of modernity wholeheartedly embrace the liberal assumptions of a thin group of economic and political reformers, who gave themselves the task of changing from above a whole traditional society, and first and foremost criticize them for their liberal beliefs and not really in accordance with their successes and failures as reformist liberal elites.

Economic and social histories tell of a different story: although modernized in the Western mindset, the Eastern European reaction of the longue durée is not to be underestimated: the modernization process was slow and heterogeneous110, while the hybridization of Western thinking to already consecrated layers of mentalities ended in fostering a society with its own peculiarities and cultural traits.

The historian of mentalities

A welcoming greeting to methodological prudence and to historical gradualism, not efficient breakthroughs, had been the lighthouse from which Alexandru Duțu has written his own accounts of local cultural histories, more so since his works testify to the importance given to cross-cultural and intercultural studies which would reveal the cultural patterns of Eastern

109

Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, vol. III: The Second Great Expansion of the Capitalist WorldEconomy, 1730-1840's, San Diego: Academic Press, 1989. 110 For the Western economy of the Middle Ages as different from the Eastern Hinterland, Georges Duby, The Early Growth of the European Economy, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York, 1974.

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Europe in general. His works have been striving “towards the cultural and psychological causes of the evolution of the literature, the study of mentalities, models and their cultural impact, towards cultural and literary anthropology”.111 As Mircea Anghelescu adds soon after in the collective work just mentioned, the original perspective of Alexandru Duțu’s interest in premodern literature is to be assessed together with his revaluation of the modernization process in the nineteenth century, which was not as radical or profound as the elites have wanted it to be portrayed in history books or to be inscribed in the general mindset. That is why it is relevant to track down the origins of modernity in the Romanian lands and, consequently, in the whole cultural space surrounding the two principalities: “the study of popular books as a cultural phenomenon, and their importance in their study of the imaginary collective in various epochs; reviewing eighteenth century texts whose importance has been neglected, texts by Chesarie de Râmnic, Gherasim Clipa or Leon Gheuca.”112 Other significant authors, ascribed to premodernity, are in fact, under Alexandru Duțu’s critical eye, forerunners both at the level of ideas and later cultural patters which will shape the general consecrated views on the local modernization process.

If there is any more ingenious and decisive contribution of Alexandru Duțu to the realm of cultural history this is to be sought in the interpretation of the mentalities in the Romanian literature at the crossroad of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: there are elements which confirm the future path of the intellectuals fashions half a century later and there are also trademarks which set the Romanian Principalities apart both from the cultural framework of Western Europe and the Ottoman rule. Alexandru Duțu capitalizes “on an extensive intellectual production that had been little noted previously” and “circumscribes a category of writings diverse enough in genre, but ultimately brought together as a more coherent whole by the concern for education, now servicing a new idea: the civic education of the new citizen, of the person constantly accumulating and reflecting the needs, tendencies and options of a society on the rise everywhere in Europe. From 111 112

Laurențiu Vlad (sour la direction de), La dimension humaine de l’histoire, Institutul European, Iași, 2012, p. 108. Ibidem

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ancient writings devoted to home management (e.g. Pseudo-Isocrates) to the ethical Enlightenment of Voltaire and Marmontel, a great number of compilations, adaptations and translations that had mobilized the efforts of various intellectuals and filled the time of the era’s readers are divided into structures and explained. Moreover, the author analyzes the consequences that being acquainted with these texts had on building a political, civil, conscious and responsible society in the Romanian principalities.”113 Together with the non-Marxist approach in the historical accounts written by Alexandru Duțu, there are no clear indications that his hermeneutical abilities are deeply influenced or subjected to the nationalistic historiography, which was part and parcel of the legitimizing school of national communism which began to intoxicate most honest academic writings after 1970, although the general rhetoric of his books is to inject normative status into the concept of the nation. The social sciences in Romania after 1971 have been gradually but firmly exposed to the intellectually suffocating commands of the regime, largely settled on devising a wide-scale national pantheon, wherein the nation could be glorified in its leaders, commencing with the almost legendary ancient chieftains and culminating in the figure of the General Secretary himself. The self-glorification of an idealized nation that has its roots in obsolete times overflowed in what is now identified as protochronism114, a manner of writing history that gave prominence and priority to ethnic “Romanians” and their lost forefathers in antiquity, centered around the fictitious scientific hoax named ‘Dacology’.115 According to Victor Neumann116, starting from the concept of le Peuple and its German avatar la Nation in the works of Jules Michelet, two concepts embedded in the period of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, the conceptual descendence of le Peuple/la Nation is traced back to the works of Ernest Renan and to the way the concept involves a kind of national

113

Ibid., p. 109. Alexandra Tomiță, O istorie “glorioasă”. Dosarul protocronismului românesc, editura Cartea Românească, 2007. 115 The best book still available on the subject of the Romanian national mythologies is still Lucian Boia, Istorie și mit în conștiința românească, ediția a III-a, editura Humanitas, București, 2006. 116 Victor Neumann, Neam, popor sau națiune?, editura Curtea Veche, Bucharest, 2004 and also Istoria României prin concepte. Perspective alternative asupra limbajelor social-politice, (Editor coordonator împreună cu Armin Heinen), editura Polirom, Iași, 2010, Essays on Romanian Intellectual History, Second Edition, Institutul European, Iași, 2013. 114

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consensus based on civic equality and citizenship, Western European realities which did not lead to bloodshed in the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, according to Victor Neumann (who identifies the history of the concept of nation in a comparative cross-European overview, in the line of Reinhart Koselleck117), the stateless German nation, without a stable territorial unity since the Middle Ages, had embraced a vision of the nation which will become the Eastern European model. Romania, later on Hungary, Bulgaria and other Balkan nations under the Austro-Hungarian administration are the result of the elitist mentality concerning the ethniccultural nation, political features which go back as far as the intellectual legacy of Herder, Hamann and Fichte. The thinker somehow responsible for the cult of an organic community, heir to a language with universalistic virtues (every language is the result of a vision stemming from a common singularity, a vague and obscure concept), ancient roots and legendary heroes, is Johann Gottfried von Herder, whose contribution to the history of mentalities has been also assessed by Isaiah Berlin in regard to the main lines of the future nationalistic campaigns led by the Bismarckian Kulturkampf118, according to which the invisible essence of a nation consists ultimately in its own race. This Volk-centered essentialism would permeate the traditional world of societies without a stable or established state and a nation exposed to diverse neighboring nations living on the same piece of land, hence with no clearly-set identity (and virtually able to favor any mass project of ethnic engineering), throughout the nineteenth century. What Victor Neumann manages to identify is the way in which the Romanian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Hungarian et al. nations transcend any vision of a down-to-earth social contract between citizens sharing equal rights as citizens while preferring the elitist demagogy which holds tight to the legal feudal privileges under the banner of a “revolutionary” nationalistic tribalism. The reality of a state erected around the stronghold of a pure “nation” in the case of Romania spills over in the twentieth century when “Greater Romania” experiences a period of state-controlled “nationalization”, as evidenced by the researches carried out by Irina 117

Reinhart Koselleck, Conceptele și istoriile lor, editura Art, București, 2009. Michael B. Gross, The War Against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti-Catholic Imagination in NineteenthCentury Germany, University of Michigan Press, 2005, Matthew Jefferies, Imperial Culture in Germany, 1871-1918, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. 118

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Livezeanu.119 The state was set around a prototypical citizen with Romanian blood and only partially accepting the Romanian citizen as somebody who benefited from full citizenship rights. A foreigner, whatever legal rights it enjoyed, was still to a certain degree a stranger from the perspective of the authorities. Not accidently, the modernization process after the 1830s disrupted and cancelled out the oral and written culture before the nineteenth century as an irrelevant cultural attempt. Alexandru Duțu’s works spring from a different vein: although they are set in a period which predates the advent of Western modernity in south-eastern Europe, none extol the legacies of an irretrievable Romanian ancient past and, at the same time, none condemn the Byzantine regime or highlight in dark colours the influence of the Ottoman Empire as culturally stifling as many later nationalistic historians have done. Although Alexandru Duțu does not go so far as to reevaluate the economic and political age of the Phanariote Greeks120, the Romanian historian portrays the period as a cultural bric-a-brac, a chaotic mosaic of many cultural tendencies, wherein Oriental, Western Enlightened and Russian elements are mixed together in a genuine cultural concoction. His task is not to reconcile the predominant historiography on the subject with the overall age, which is critical and harsh regarding the achievements of the Romanian Principalities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries while blaming it all on the presence of major Empires in the region and safeguarding the eternally political virtues of the local elites that had to unwillingly surrender to external pressures in order to preserve a certain degree of political autonomy, but to cast an eye on the failures of modernity in the region because the reformist policies, inspired by the certainty of only one way to modernity, that is Westernborne, were too radical considering the cultural and economic levels of the societies in southeastern Europe. However, this is not to say that Alexandru Duțu is at odds with his contemporaries on most subjects, but it is his general overview that counts.

119

Irina Livezeanu, Cultură şi naţionalism în România Mare, 1918-1930, editura Humanitas, București, 1998. I would like to mention here the contribution of Bogdan Murgescu, Țările Române între Imperiul Otoman și Europa creștina, editura Polirom, Iași, 2012, on the complexity of the subject here mentioned. 120

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Political modernity and the traditional mindset The first attempt of Alexandru Duțu to throw a new glance on what had been the literary output prior to nineteenth century is Coordonate ale culturii românești în secolul al XVIII-lea, a book published in 1968 and covering the spread and the influence of texts in the Romanian lands between 1700 and 1821. From the outset, Alexandru Duțu states that in spite of a rather lack of printing presses in south-eastern Europe in comparison to the Western counterparts, the available literature circulated and reached the courts of the local noblemen121. While at the beginning of the eighteenth century by literature one referred to any written text bound into a volume or in a form of a manuscript, with the exposure to the Enlightened ideas of the West, “literature” itself diversifies into small genres, not as consistent as in Western Europe, where the public had also diversified along the economic developments of the hierarchized middle classes, but still copying the Western model122. “The development takes place in a seemingly slow rhythm because the historical circumstances in which the Romanian countries had been in the course of the century [the eighteenth century] are not suitable to a continuous and diversified development: the foreign rule, the wars, the usual epidemics, the instability of the princely courts, able to protect the literary circles which were still depending, all across Europe, on them; the rhythm is however slow because the mentality continuously evolves, as the literary prints of the age testify – especially the mail, as well as some excerpts from historical works which allow us to see into an intellectual life richer that the one which managed to reach the published works.”123 The cultural milieus involved, although representing the elites, are still to a large degree dependent, at least as far as the local mentalities are concerned, on oral works of literature, by which it was meant either works of art belonging to the folk or the high respect showed to rhetoric. The high esteem owed to folk works is due to the historically-testified fact that the 121

Eugen Negrici, Narațiune în cronicile lui Grigore Ureche și Miron Costin, editura Minerva, București, 1972, Imanența literaturii, editura Cartea Românească, Iași, 2009, pp. 21-109. 122 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, editura pentru Literatură Universală, București, 1967, pp. 434-500. 123 Alexandru Duțu, Coordonate ale culturii românești în secolul al XVIII-lea, editura pentru Literatură, București, 1968, p. 8-9.

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clergy in the two principalities was still connected and part of the peasant population. The general level of the scriptural education among the priests of the local Orthodox Church was, according to the account of Alexandru Duțu, rather low, but this occured within a largely illiterate rural population. On the other hand, the high place held by the study of rhetoric was directly linked to the Greek schools, “where the ancient rhetoric was studied and intensely refined.”124 What Alexandru Duțu is diligently looking for has more to do with how the mentality of the scriptural elites has changed during the eighteenth century and to what extent this transformation at the level of tastes and preferences has contributed to the alteration of what was acknowledged as valuable and precious literature. Even the choice of the translated books might give a hint to a shift in the mentality since there must be a significant mass of readers interested in the subject. Alexandru Duțu adds that he has tried to “retrace the past of some significant cultural manifestations, to throw light on some forms of the literary taste in the eighteenth century, allowing ourselves to signal some antecedents of the literary forms that entered the modern Romanian literature. And this has been done only because the texts contain new elements that are at the same time widely spread and can show the stages through which the literary tastes had passed”. 125 Despite the harsh reality of an almost illiterate general public in the two lands, the books which were read by a few members of the elite had impregnated an oral mentality. The mental chasm separating the higher echelons from the common people was not a wide chasm at all. Some of the ideas of these books have spread to the masses and have influenced them, although it is beyond doubt difficult, if not untenable, to estimate to what degree this had happened. 1821 has been chosen as a milestone after which the Romanian principalities had begun their modernization process.

124 125

Ibidem. Ibid., p. 13

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“Even if the circulation of works in the territory of our country denotes a concomitant development of mentality which has been confirmed by the multiple contacts between the most important scholars of the Enlightenment.”126 What Alexandru Duțu points out as distinctive for the local culture at the end of the eighteenth century is the relevance of the “living element” that “spread at the level of mentalities managed to gain more relevance because of that characteristic which enhances the identification of that living fact that in a culture so vivid as the Romanian one [is] the strong constant connection between the written word and spoken or painted beauty, between the artistic act and the historical one.”127 Most of the pre-modern scholars already resemble some of the ideological traits which will distinguish the 1848 generation, that is acknowledging the civic rights of the people (in a more legal sense, probably borrowed from Enlightened absolutism of the eighteenth century Habsburg Empire) and a critique of the social practices prevalent in the two Principalities before the 1800s. Some of the values which have been Persian or largely Oriental at the beginning have merged with values discovered in the roman de chevalerie or the European poetry of late medievalism. Alexandru Duțu also believes in the humanist encyclopaedism of the late scholars in the Principalities in the eighteenth century. According to Duțu, the enlightened encyclopaedism is socially-oriented against the despotism prevalent in Moldavia and Wallachia and communicates with the Latinist school from Transylvania: it is an encyclopaedism which grows from the study of the history, geography and language of the people living on the territories of future Romania. Apparently, there is no difference between the Romantic pathos for national unity and the themes of the generation before, but it might be for this lack of nationalistic propaganda and the scientific discovery of a political and social self-consciousness that makes the age so ripe in ideas. The volume Coordonate ale culturii românești în secolul al XVIII-lea is in fact a collection of relevant fragments, each of them being ascribed a thorough study written by Alexandru 126 127

Ibid., p. 15 Ibid., p. 17

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Duțu, from texts which had enough circulation before or around 1800s for us to speak about a cultural profile of the main mentalities present at the time at the top of the society. The first study is focused on the books for “delight” or leisure which are typical for the age of Constantin Brâncoveanu. The main texts under debate, Floarea darurilor and Pildele filosofești, are, according to a taxonomy taken from Nicolae Iorga, part of the libre de sagesse genre, but coming at the crossroads of civilizations: the books were destined for the private contemplation of the boyars and the Court, being prototypically a book comprised of moral pedagogical lessons and a lively, somewhat shallow attempt to portray the main political experiments that were taking place in the realm of ideas in Western Europe. The reign of Constantin Brâncoveanu did not only bring with it a period of stable economic development, but also deeper contacts with the Western world, especially the Italian and Greek intellectual foci. “Whether it is true or not that the publishing of church books in the Romanian language in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had achieved the creation of the instrument through which literature had also been created, these published texts did not contribute by themselves to the increase in the number of readers and the creation of literary tastes or for written literature.”128 There are many similarities existing between the origins of literary works in the Romanian lands and what was going on at the same time in the neo-Greek literature south of the Danube. At the end of the 1700s, the humanists of the two principalities are writing a religious didactic literature, part of it consisting of versifications. “The published books have therefore brought in the first place the preoccupation to formulate a Romanian terminology adequate to the subjects which are present in the texts written in languages, as well as implementing the beginning of a dialogue with some readers who are foremost clergymen, but not only.”129

128 129

Ibid., p. 29 Ibid, p. 33

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The schools of rhetoric in the two countries were largely influenced by a resurgence of the neoAristotelianism in the Balkan region and the textbooks of neo-Aristotelian thinkers like Teofil Coridaleu130 were in use for almost one hundred years. The moral precepts were passing through a phase of mild laicization. The literary style was still mostly colloquial, testifying to the close intertwining between the cultural-written accounts and the oral-spoken ones. Many of the first texts which had a pronounced laical inclination, especially the ones that dealt mainly with moral precepts, folkloric tales, chronographs, rules of the just governing or advice in regard to social behavior and courtly manners, were gathered together under the guise of a miscellanea, attesting the personal and portable nature of reading and meditating. “Judging from a general point of view, some sayings from Pildelele filosofești correspond to the advice from Floarea darurilor: prudence and moderation are natural advice in the two works, which try to open a pathway through the dark woods where beasts roam, embodied not only in sins, but also in political forces that fight for their prey by crushing the most precious good, which is the human being. It is on man that the sum of all observations and thoughts expressed in the books of wisdom is centered. In this respect, one could observe that, in the sense, the book is meant to deepen the virtue by the psychological investigation it widens up; the interest for the from which vice and virtue originate turn gradually into curiosity for the psyche, an evolution which has its grounds in the work published in 1713 and then a justification as decades go by, placing itself in a context gradually invaded by the enlightened rationalism. Nonetheless, even the antagonism between the worldly life and wisdom will perpetually change during the century, starting, however, from a background that allows for these changes, because both Pildele filosofești and Cantemir’s Divan places this conflict in the complexity of the daily life itself; as long as the rational systematic education has replaced the oral sharing of knowledge from teacher to apprentice, the opposition has started to

130

Ștefan Afloroaiei, Cum este posibilă filosofia în estul Europei, editura Polirom, Iași, 1998 or Dicționarul operelor filozofice românești (coordonator general Ion Ianoși, coordonatori Vasile Morar, Ilie Pârvu, Dragan Stoianovici, Gheroghe Vlăduțescu), editura Humanitas, București, 1997.

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diminish and, at that moment, the book from 1713 had been subject to fragmentation and selection, as the short collection by Leon Gheuca from 1786 indicates.”131 This book of wise aphorisms is not destined to celebrate the noble values of the feudal aristocracy. It is rather an affirmation of reason which borrows traits from the moralistic works of the enlightenment. Individual self-realization is linked to the dignity of man and the values of prudence, patience and wisdom give way to a new type of spirituality. The age of shifting mentalities was at its dusk. It is highly dubious to affirm that the new type of literature is just a mere figment of Western imagination transplanted and translated onto Eastern grounds. On the contrary, the age of modernity lies far ahead, but the first steps have been taken. Before the 1800s, the literature which started to gain prominence in the high ranks of the society showed signs of breaking away with the strictly dogmatic biblical content of Slavonic sacred texts. Alexandru Duțu will go on by highlighting the gradual evolution of the process at stake, both continuous and syncretic, especially so since it was a “warm support” for the intertwining between the rational argument and a certain sensibility, “which conveys to the Romanian Enlightenment its own place” in the European world of ideas, “where the theoretical side could sometimes storm into the realm of fantastic legends, while the apologetic sentimental one had achieved a register difficult to comprehend in other cultures.”132 Although most of the authors at stake belong to the liturgical sphere of influence, i.e. they are Orthodox thinkers, traces of the belief in the possibilities of human reason in a world which could be deciphered in and by itself are identifiable in the texts selected for the anthology by Alexandru Duțu. The center of culture coincided with the zealous activity of a working printing press, the most proliferous publishing setting in the eighteenth century being Rîmnic. All throughout the eighteenth century, the Romanian publishing centers in Transylvania halted their activity because of the control and administrative predominance of the Habsburg authorities. However, even under dire circumstances, there was no reluctance for the spread of new political ideas 131 132

Ibid., p. 58-59. Ibid., p. 120

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under patristic theological guise. Chesarie from Rîmnic will be for Alexandru Duțu the short but eloquent representative of a scholar who is set between two worlds: the world of traditions, which have remained alive contrary to all expectations and under terrible historical challenges, the new world of law and “patrie”, a concept used by Chesarie in some instances with the same clarity as a nineteenth century scholar. “The historical time had, therefore, its own characteristics and laws; it is linked to Providence’s plans” but the new meaning acquired by time in the mental framework of the age is that “it could be also used so that people can start here on a new path”133. As evidenced by the many texts and men of letters that Alexandru Duțu quotes, there has been a gradual increase of ideas belonging to the age of enlightenment134, although the connection to the liturgical sources is still strong and the social and political ideals of the age of reasons are still very weakly present in the intellectual imaginary of the local thinkers. The first translations from Fenelon, Montesquieu and Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man date from this period as well. Moldavia and Wallachia were experiencing the same stable wave of western conceptual influence. The Romanian written word in Transylvania, owned to its poor ability to be available to as much as many people as possible, has a certain distinctive place. “In this movement of ideas the written word acquires a decisive role: the book and the newspapers become the means of communication by excellence, but culture begins to signify a participation of the values which are being formulated and will develop through the means of the pen and the press. (…) Under these circumstances, the publishing house has an essential role, and the process of is one of the determinant conditions of the existence of the new cultural mode. is opposed to the , and wisdom acquires the meaning of exercising reason, distinct from the traditional understanding of a which allows for the separation of good from evil, of 133

Ibid., p. 140 For a thorough up to date study of the political ideas behind the age, see Jonathan Israel, A Revolution of the Mind. Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy, Princeton University Press 2010, while for the multiple epistemological shades of the intellectual legacy of the Age of Enlightenment, see Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment, Cambridge University Press, 2013. 134

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the necessity from the dangerous uselessness, of the essential from the deceiving appearance.”135 Overall, the oral tradition reinforces itself over the written word, both stylistically and in so far as the content is regarded. Science, the flourishing of the literary arts, the political and social reformist endeavor have an influence, although small, in the new mindset of the Eastern European scholar at the end of the eighteenth century. The standing of rhetoric, combined with the high esteem a good spokesperson used to have in an oral culture, constitutes a cultural landmark. The new influence of the Greek schools and their consecration of Aristotle’s stature are yet other intellectual trademarks of the region at the time. Historical and social literature is highly regarded by the public, so long as this public is limited to the literate rich city dwellers. Since most of the ideas from Coordonate ale culturii românești în secolul al XVIII-lea follow the logic of a short text which precedes a series of fragments from late eighteenth century texts, Alexandru Duțu will deliberately settle on developing some of the interpretations in Sinteză și originalitate în cultura română, a book published in 1972. In the first chapter of this work, Alexandru Duțu accomplishes the task of pinpointing the main historiographical disputes which have attempted to reconcile the origins of the local literature. As previously alluded to, for most scholars on the subject, there is a wide chasm between the pre-eighteenth century and the new, more developed, that is to say, more modern, , of the nineteenth century. Alexandru Duțu reinforces the fact that this perspective is not only to be identified in the Romanian case, but it is an interpretation of the past which has gained solid ground in most of the cultures of the region. The general consensus, which Alexandru Duțu summarizes, is that, although there have been some vivid influences in the cultures of the region before 1800s, one cannot speak of a genuine literature. In fact, literature as an artistic product or as a final work of art, meant for the esthetic delights of this time, came only later and abruptly, by Western interference. Literature was still linked solidly into a general unspecialized composite, together with the sciences of the age or with the liturgical chronographs. It was the modernization 135

Ibid., p. 219.

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process which triggered the passionate adventure of gaining lost distances and of creating, in a short lapse of time of only two generations, a genuine literature in Romanian, comparable, at least chronologically, with its French, English, etc. counterparts. Alexandru Duțu states that “if we direct our interest towards the whole written culture, taken as a whole with many manifestations, then one will concentrate on the transformations undergone by a homogenous culture until the intellectual activities have deliberately divided and the collective cultural experience has become conscientious of the diversity of individual experiences. As long as the transformations are identified to have taken place in perfectly different stages, labeling too generally and with a narrow purpose does not prove useful.”136 The various stages through which the oral and written cultures have passed reflect the social dynamism of the time. According to Alexandru Duțu, there has been no radical and sudden break with a past, but a sequence of generations which have gradually, steadily and not altogether visibly, departed from mental habits and custom and acquired, again moderately and step by step, the ideas, the ideals and the social changes which were beginning to ascertain the mental framework of most European societies during the age of Enlightenment. Historians, such as Paul Hazard137, settle the birthdate of the new modern consciences under the banner of the crisis which began to erode the social and mental structures of the civilized West ever since the onset of the eighteenth century. The ripples of the new waves of ideas have landed on the eastern shores of Europe as well, nevertheless, significantly reduced in intensity and slightly anachronistic. The written works, followed in their subtle changes of vocabulary, ideas, perceptions, are the living testimonies of a civilization which is undergoing internal alterations.

136

Alexandru Duțu, Sinteză și originalitate în cultura română, Editura enciclopedică română, 1972, București, p. 48.

137

Paul Hazard, Criza conștiinței europene, 1680-1715, editura Humanitas, București, 2007.

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The break with the past may appear revolutionary at the surface if one would isolate important events from the flow of time, but the minor and constant changes give the final effect its strength, poignancy and relevance. The predominance of orality is again not to be disputed. “Under the circumstances, until the nineteenth century, writing has not recorded all the possibilities of expression, but has only retained only a part of the ways of exteriorizing the mentalities. Ascribed to fulfilling a function, invested with a well-known authority in the life of the community, writing reflects the circumstances of accomplishing an officium – the princely, the ecclesiastical and aristocratic one. The lord’s decisions are written down, memorable documents are cut into stone, liturgical tests are published, and the major events of a country are also written. Other forms are allowed for orality and expression. One will not find in writing the whole intellectual activity of the society, but only the one, until the age of humanists, when writing starts its ascent, which ends in the romantic age, when writing spreads to all sectors of intellectual activity, separating itself from the folklore and the visual arts.”138 From the synchronic interspersing of foreign influences and the local , the mental structures are once again cast into different shapes. What did not achieve the level of a fixed mental structure would soon be forgotten. The long-lasting traditions, together with their obsolete social framework, had to be revised. “In the stages of density, the assimilations have integrated in the directions set by expression and, by melting it again, have taken part in the original process of revising the past. This relationship between synthesis and originality is to be found in all the major stages which we will review and, through the means of it, the cultural domain has extended and crystallized.”139 Traditional values acquire new meanings and the values they give birth to carry more load on the mental structures. The stages of increased cultural density are detailed by Alexandru Duțu henceforth. The first concept Alexandru Duțu comes up with to define an epoch is the civic 138 139

Alexandru Duțu, Sinteză și originalitate în cultura română, Editura enciclopedică română, 1972, București, p. 64. Ibid., p. 86-87.

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humanism of the eighteenth century scholar, who becomes an epitome of an entire age that looks beyond the narrow horizon of medieval figures, such as the knight or the clergyman. The new generations of scholars turn back to the written testimonies of the ancient Roman or Greek civilization, inspired by their Western counterparts. A new school of thinking concentrates more on the benefits of education: new pedagogical models are to be found in the eighteenth century texts. As far as the style is regarded, there was an urge to create a type of literature which had little in common with the oral tradition. Hence, new words are introduced into the language in the hope of gaining distinction and superiority in the eyes of the ruling classes. The references to classical authors are again an indication of how much the language needed to change if it wanted to compete with other cultures in Europe. However, the orality of the culture will persist even under written form. The causes of this are twofold: on the one hand, the local aristocracy was neither independent from foreign control nor too powerful in the Romanian lands so as to trigger the development of other intermediate social classes, e.g. urban dwellers or small landholders, on the other hand, most scholars who wrote during the age had petty origins directly related to the peasant strata and so carried in their writings a degree of orality which was considered natural and not problematic. The cultural centers for the young scholars were directed towards Istanbul and Padova, places where the Western ideas were only gradually beginning to be accepted and appreciated. Alexandru Duțu entrusts the civic humanism of the age into the works of Dimitrie Cantemir, Constantin Cantacuzino Stolnicul, Miron Costin, who give the impetus for a future retracing of the new modern consciousness that was interested in natural sciences, geography and history. “The traditional standings are critically reconsidered and the doubt in the viability of some well-established concepts is clearly expressed, but the worldview is not completely renovated. The new viewpoints are expressed by people who are still attached to the social and economic feudal structure; the openness does not involve a clear detachment from the ideology of the predecessors and does not introduce points of view that are so new and strong into the traditional conceptions so as to force them to look for a refuge less in

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intelligence and more in sensibility, moving into the background gradually and leaving open its place to rational system of thinking. Old precepts are reconsidered in order to support more vigorously the political struggle, and that is why they are partially, but constantly changed practically; the prestige of intellectual values is maintained, which even goes up because of the critical spirit; the openness to the common folk is also increasing, although there is the idea that the great masses should be in the fight, but not incorporated by studying its own demands; the man is the center of attention, which seems better rooted into a clearly distinguished social environment.”140 The society itself becomes more individualized and, as already mentioned earlier, the role of education becomes a mark of distinction in the higher ranks. The local language is more and more favored, even in liturgical texts, although the conservatism of most printing presses and clerical publishers is not to be underestimated. Foreign books enter the two countries at an unprecedented rate and the vocabulary of the time enriches itself with many words borrowed initially from Greek, Latin or Turkish. The diversification of intellectual activities brings also a new view of time, which is rectilinear and therefore historical. Ethics will be given high importance in the scholarly mindset. The humanist scholars are fond of the almost infinite possibilities of man’s reason and skill as long as they coalesce around a civilization. Although the exterior political battles and the military campaigns are daily threats, the intellectual representatives of the Romanian lands have already initiated their quest for reason, education and the dignity of man, inspired by the tide of ideas which was sweeping the western outskirts of the continent. The Conceptual Toolkit The second period in the development of the ideas and mentalities at the close of the eighteenth century is for Alexandru Duțu the so-called concept of “patriotic enlightenment”. The first aspect which gains importance in the period is the intense circulation of books, mostly 140

Ibid., p. 113

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translations which will determine the worldview of the new elites. The same tidal wave of ideas coming in the form of books is present in all the three historical lands. What first turns out more prominent is the selective process of the local elites: mostly, the translated books are either related to didactic works, or to the tales or short story that are deeply moralizing. The philosophical masterpieces of the eighteenth century will gradually enter the world of ideas of south-eastern Europe, but this will not be the case at the beginning of the nineteenth century. “The revolutionary current, which completely questions or denies the institutions and the values of the Ancien Régime, creates a deep and general spiritual crisis.”141 The age of nationalisms is becoming prominent while the feudal ties weaken by every forthcoming decade142. The information that comes from the West does not reach the lower echelons of society, which is a limit to the fast step of implementing ideas into the fabric of everyday life. The level of economic dynamism was still lagging far behind the mainstream development of Western Europe at the time. As far as ideas are concerned, there has not been any revolutionary change in mentalities, but the steady rhythm by which systems of ideas were imported leads to a peremptory change in the kinds of books read by the literate classes. Historical recording benefits from the Western influence and the prospects of assembling a local history with its own set of values are better than ever before. The quantity of texts all throughout the eighteenth century, although still controlled by the Church, increases to never before seen heights. The public is also made largely of merchants and noblemen. “We can identify that the translation of works which were extremely popular at the time of the editing of books that contain new ideas stems from the initiative of boyars or 141

Ibid., p. 126. On the subject of nations and nationalism, see Hans Kohn, Nationalism: Its Meaning and History, Robert E. Krieger Publishing Co, 1982, Prophets and peoples: Studies in nineteenth century nationalisms, Octagon Books, London, 1972, Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalisms, Cornell University Press, 2009, Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, Harvard University Press, 1993, Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Verso, 2006, Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge University Press, 2012, Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalisms since 1780, Cambridge University Press, 2012, Elie Kedourie, Nationalism, Wiley-Blackwell, 1993, Peter F. Sugar, (ed.), Eastern European Nationalism in the Twentieth Century, The American University Press, Washington, 1995, Peter F. Sugar, Ivo J. Lederer (eds.), Nationalism in Eastern Europe, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1994. 142

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clergymen, the diffusion and generally the amplification of contacts with the intellectual movement of the continent are owned to some intellectual circles from the urban centers or to merchants who associate their interest for short-term gains with the curiosity for a literature willing to speak about their world, about the ethics that dominate social interactions, about the fantastic adventures of some couples which show what place feelings and passions occupy in man’s existence.”143 As mentioned earlier, the development of historiography is quintessential both for the role played by reason and political ideals at the time. The patriotic zeal is not to be underestimated. From a circular traditional time the historiography of the age moves on to a linear sensible comprehension of historical events. This is also a testimony of the influence of Enlightenment’s ideas in the region.144 A new self-consciousness takes shape from these elements mixed together, which is at the same time traditional and open to modernity. The oral and scriptural levels of mentalities intersperse during the decades before the fullfledged modernizing desideratum of the mid-nineteenth century. “Without doubt, the Romanian enlightened thinkers have deliberately looked for a place of the written Romanian culture within the European culture: this is demonstrated not only by the predominance of the enlightened Europe in the general consciousness, but also by the on-going dialogue, at a superior and more vivid level, with foreign specialists”.145 Next on, Alexandru Duțu will devote a special chapter to the heroic figure of the romantic revolutionary of 1848. This type of political romanticism, which exulted over the inner merits of the nation and its long-lasting tradition, helped the consolidation of the concept of nation in the process of state-building in the Romanian lands. After 1821, the Romanian ties to the West develop economically so much that in the coming generation the necessity of designing a political framework - fitting the new commercial ties - that is borrowed from the West was the 143

Ibid., p. 156 On the question of the relevance of enlighted republican ideas in the region, see Paul Cornea, Originile romantismului românesc, editura Cartea Românească, 2009, pp. 55-59. 145 Alexandru Duțu, Sinteză și originalitate în cultura română, Editura enciclopedică română, 1972, București, p. 166 144

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accomplishment of the revolutionaries and intellectuals around 1850. The literate public in the cities diversifies and looks forward to an increase in the number of books translated at the time. The presence of a need for daily matters and affairs could be traced back to the founding of the local press. As a side effect of the urban loisir, the dramatic arts start to take their toll in the public space with mostly popular performances, but there was enough room for the elites as well. Political and literary clubs are often meshed into one another. However, most cultural elements were imported and there were only meek signs of local artistic originality within the urban classes in the age. Alexandru Duțu stresses an important point at this moment of his cultural history: in spite of the merits of the 1848 generation, there had been an oral and scriptural tradition in the Romanian lands before the onset of Western cultural models would begin to swipe away old and perishable mental patters. There is a radical openness to universal works of art which slowly dismantle the high throne on which the liturgical tradition had stood on no more than half a century before. The process of modernization might have seemed radical as far as the elites were concerned, but rather feeble and still foreign for the rest of the society. A new sense of individualism and an emphasis on the question of subjectivity gain ground in the public debate, even more so in intellectual circles. All these traits were envisaged in the emancipatory will of the ruling classes, respectively the boyars who wanted to break away with the established norms and help to consolidate a thriving Romanian bourgeoisie and landowners’ class. New concepts, such as , , , are introduced in the public agenda and will reshape the mentalities of most social classes. “Naturally, the shifts in the fields of intellectual activity have been triggered by the remapping of knowledge, a situation which occurred both by the prestige of sciences and clarification of some concepts”146 and also due to the role-model represented by the European civilization, scurrying towards its highest ever recorded peak of economic, social and political development in the nineteenth century. The oral culture did survive, but was gently relegated to an inferior position in the 146

Ibid., p. 207

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modern hierarchy of knowledge, which had begun to be common for the whole European civilization. Alexandru Duțu further on elaborates on the issue whether or not the Romanian culture after 1821 and the modernizing mental framework of 1848 had anything in common to the previous cultural models or whether it was a genuine new-born acculturation that denied the existence of any tradition: “The truth is that the differences between the intellectual activities which had occurred in different stages are responsible for the different relations which are established between the areas of the expressive framework, which also indicate variations in the mental structures. The debate about the connection between the microcosm and macrocosm, about corresponding levels show a certain overview on the world and society, whereas the attention given to scientific exploration of nature and the laws of progress, discovered after the historical analysis of the civilization forms, indicate another point of view. But if the mental structures are different, where could the connections be traced?” 147 His assessment goes beyond the confines of a rigid debasement of the local traditions before the eve of modernity in the nineteenth century. Alexandru Duțu admits to the economic backwardness and the constant series of warlike strife that have dominated the political life in the region, but backlashes by protesting against the shallow historical retrospective view of the cultural impact of the humanistic, orthodox, enlightened and oral cultural tradition before the advent of Westernization in south-eastern Europe: his testimony is a clear indictment of both the romantic Romanian historians who have centered exclusively on the merits of the nation in the past and its supposedly justified desire to assemble into a strong nation-state against the Oriental dark age which preceded it and a clear unbiased account of the ontological values of the pre-modern society that was already on its own path of assembling together various cultural traditions.

147

Ibid., p. 212

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Many of the ideas and concepts which are being enhanced methodologically in Sinteză și originalitate în cultura română (1972) share most of the historical analysis with the main lines in Cărțile de înțelepciune în cultura română (1972), perhaps the most academic and rigorous study published by Alexandru Duțu during the 1970s. Alexandru Duțu starts from the general assumption that the types of literature which were of public interest in the second half of the nineteenth century could be sensibly grouped into two large categories under the allencompassing heading of “books of wisdom”: books that were meant for the general public, id est the urbanized literate social milieus, which assembled together various topics regarding the behavior, the tastes and mental preferences of the modern civilized man, and another category of books, called mirror for princes or Fürstenspiegel, that explicitly had a didactic content of self-help textbooks for would-be rulers and kings. These kinds of books are organized as vivid testimonies of the mental framework that had been changing organically in the latter half of the eighteenth century. “In the writings under re-categorization one does not come across too many assumptions in regard to the necessity of a radical change in the readers’ conceptions; but it is certain that neither a book would not have been published nor a manuscript copied relentlessly, given the harsh circumstances in which the written culture has developed in the Romanian lands, if that piece of work had not been the answer to a spiritual need, either because its author felt responsible to express his ideas, or that the readers had felt the need to look for an explanation to real issues in the pages already read.”148 Alexandru Duțu goes on and searches through the intricate depths of the so-named “books of behavior”. Most of the content consists of apothegms meant for the monastic communities and for the majority of the clergymen: the wisdom of the sayings is largely moralistic and relates to the individual’s behavior in his effort to attain spiritual purity. This is why the image of the saint as a human prototype undercuts the whole project. Among these books, one is still within the confines of the traditional world. However, when the public enlarges and diversifies the books of liturgical wisdom are slowly engulfed by more mundane requests: signs of a shifting 148

Alexandru Duțu, Cărțile de înțelepciune în cultura română, editura Academiei Republicii Socialiste România, București, 1972, p. 14.

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mentality become visible at the end of the seventeenth century. Apocryphal elements of folkloric origin pour into the books of wisdom. Part of the responsibility of the continuous change at the level of the elite’s mentality is due to the tightened contact between the local scholars and the universities of today’s northern Italy, from where, during the eighteenth century, the local men of letters return after study. The humanist of the new century follows on the track of the general crisis of the European consciousness around 1700s by delimiting, and thus separating, the domain of ethics within the realm of theology. Thus, the epistemological foundations of Eastern European traditionalism are steadily beginning to shake before collapsing a century later on. “What is of interest to our study is that, within the books of wisdom, some of them in the form of dialogue, humanistic problems are introduced, foreign to the asceticism which the were preaching; the collections – among which there should be comprised some parts of the works of questions and answers, into which there were inserted genuine sayings from the folklore, or texts that were dealing in the same way with biblical matters, some variants reproducing basic folkloric beliefs or even remnants from old Bogomil writings, therefore, a genre which was extremely diverse, not to say -, change and the predominant characteristic is debating the contemporary issues of the age.”149 The brand-new elements in the new books destined for the private enjoyment of the educated few were distributed along the dichotomy of good versus bad, but this time, what is a further development to the theological rhetoric, the description of virtues and vices in the social confines of the epoch appears not to upset the traditionalism of the period, which lacks the stiffness and prudery of past ages. “One can state that images which the collections of wisdom from Greek manuscripts offer, that have been edited or used in the Romanian countries, indicate a narrowing of their purpose (addressing in a lesser degree the general public and more the king’s administration), but also a deeper understanding of the genre (the former student getting 149

Ibid., p. 23

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used to cropping with one’s own tastes the maxims which could attract one’s attention at a further reading). When taste develops and the mentality is commencing its change in the second half of the century, the man of letters dares to add in one’s personal collection of maxims quotes from European enlightened thinkers, who were giving another kind of advice than Plutarch or the much revered Cato”.150 Most books published during the eighteenth century follow three tracks: books meant for schooling, others designed to vulgarize the most important up-to-date scientific discoveries and, last but not the least, the writings which opened new vistas in the mentalities of the society. Nonetheless, if it had not been for the sweeping tide of ideas emanated from the Romanian-speaking scholars of Transylvania, the reformist aspects present in the scholarly works of most clergymen in Wallachia and Moldavia would have gone largely unnoticed. The society itself was barely administered properly by the local elites, the state itself was under vicious attacks from the Ottoman Empire and there was not internal social dynamism to foster a spirit of reformist emulation of rationalism in daily affairs as was the case in Central Europe of the time. Henceforth, the archetypical break with the past might be rather connected to the increased interest of the Transylvanian clergymen for the question of citizenship and civil rights. The works were destined to capture the attention of the urban dwellers, consisting mainly of advice in public appearance and social behavior, of the importance of history and social ties, of traditions that need to be protected and of superstitions and spiritual forgeries that should be dispensed with. The place of the laic education is an improvement in comparison to the past: acquiring knowledge in the fields of natural sciences leads to a better control of daily matters. The illuminating constancy of scientific knowledge underlies the enlightened writings of the Transylvanian branch of Romanian scholars and men of letters. The works of Lord Chesterfield or Alexander Pope151 begin to circulate in the dense atmosphere of the epoch, 150 151

Ibid., p. 29. Alexander Pope, The Major Works, edited by Pat Rogers, Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. 270-309.

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epistemologically homogenized in the traditional patters of the Zeitgeist. At length, the privilege of the spoken word slides gently into oblivion as long as the written records multiply with every decade: nevertheless, the high respect showed to the eloquence of good spokespersons will be a trademark of the entire region. An educated individual should be distinguished both in appearance and in the process of expressing ideas152. More specifically, most topics of concern were centered on the nation, the progress of the public mores and of the material life even before 1800s. The first glimpse of social selfconsciousness in the Eastern European lands had been a direct reaction to the cosmopolitan empirically-concerned civilized middleman of Western Europe. “Not only a series of concepts, but also the classical examples have gone into disuse and this happened because of the impetus taken by the sole study of universal history; thus one can look at the transformation of , which no longer stand as embodiments of any divine manifestation, but rather authentic and factual historical models. The transformation is evident in the contents of the , in which we have seen inserted fragments from the history of the Romanian people, as well as in the series of printings which record some books dedicated to historical figures.”153 Instead of the sententious biblical extracts or excerpts from the ancient classics one gets exposed to a collection of wise sayings from different, chronologically marked, periods in the past, up to the present time. Instead of abstract allegorical depiction of vices and virtues, the public is rendered to judge the diversity of human characters such as in the “characters” of the modern French Theophrastus, Jean de La Bruyère. Instead of the mild advice given to an extratemporal social order, static as all traditional gnoseology, the minds of the age absorb de ideas of patriotism under a national flag and revolutionary anti-feudal republican ideas. In Alexandru Duțu’s own words: “The work of the great revolutionary writer marks another climatic point in the evolution of the genre, its whole problematic, brought to a socio-political stage, having been defended 152 153

Lord Chesterfield, Lord Chesterfield’s Letters, Oxford University Press, 2008. Ibid., p. 56.

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in a rational manner, which starts from the premise that human self-fulfillment is accomplished only with the means of the human being. By inscribing the human being in the life of society, has reached its final stage, reaching the natural conclusions of a long intellectual process that has crystallized two centuries before.”154 The citizen is part of the society at least nominally, at the level of ideas. This has been a mental breakthrough for Eastern Europe in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The next kind of books which will influence the mental background and foreground of the literate classes is the Fürstenspiegel genre. Apparently medieval and encrusted in the liturgical tradition, the mirror of the princes could and had been able to incorporate the modern concepts that sprang from the crisis of consciousness at the around the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe, which the works of Paul Hazard have magisterially demonstrated155. Part of the orthodox rationalism Alexandru Duțu has already referred to are the limits imposed by the traditions of the church to the powers of the kings, who could easily get trapped into the moral monstrosity of tyranny and godless arbitrary in the use and abuse of power in the state administration. The spiritual power still dominates, at least conceptually, the temporal power in the eighteenth century in Eastern Europe. “Based on this principle rights and duties were created that had their sanction in divine judgment. In the spirit of eastern spirituality, particularized most of all by isihasm, a major stress is put on the unifying power of love (hence, the great contribution of the coherence of human and divine wills, that synergy meant to create an openness to noticing the essence and, simultaneously, to back up the aspiration towards totality that stops the more active intervention of the systematic reason, which defines the domains of human activity).”156 We are still in pre-modernity, but the homogenous nature of the mental framework in traditional societies stands up for its own sets of values. However, the heroism of the ruler will 154

Ibid., p. 61. I am here referring to Paul Hazard’s two books, available also in Romanian: Criza conștiinței moderne, editura Humanitas, București, 2007 and Gîndirea europeană în secolul al XVIII-lea, editura Univers, București, 1981. 156 Ibid., p. 78 155

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be steadily replaced by the opinion that the supremacy of law would be just as useful for the society and the community. The king is still the sovereign of all laws in the kingdom, but since he is also subject to the laws founded into the realm of God, the laws govern in abstracto by themselves, but only in principle. This is not a process of deluding ourselves since the historical testimony speaks otherwise: the lack of appropriate laws together with the hallow spirit of the laws constituted the daily practicalities of governance. The scholastic studies which were interfering with the traditional philosophy in the schools of the age led to the direction of innovation and, thus, borrowing the abstract impersonal essence of the modern law would take the form of reformist enlightened mentality. The absolute divine power of the king, because of the French books that are under translation in Eastern Europe, begins to be questioned and, at least mentally, checked and balanced by the principal of the law’s omnipotence. “At the level of values, the shift from the predominance of ethical values to the advance of political values speaks for itself.”157 And a bit further on: “If we don’t come across the prospect of any political theory and if resorting to wisdom (especially significant in the context of our topic) continues to have a preponderant function, it is beyond any shadow of doubt that the issue of the political power is seen in the terms (which we find present both at Fénelon and Massillon): master-subjects. These do not have the function of a simple reference point, but they are the ones which hold the crown with . The demophil spirit moves the issue, itself reflecting the social mutation which takes place at the level of creation and of cultural action in the last decades of the eighteenth century – the first two decades from the twentieth century.”158 The influence of Western ideas and ideals is felt also through the intermediate reformist urges of the Transylvanian School of Romanian intellectuals, who borrow most of the legalistic and administrative attributes from the enlightened despotism of the Habsburg Empire. 157 158

Ibid., p. 91. Ibid., p. 93.

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“The economic life under transformation and the new social relations from the Romanian principalities, as well as from the surrounding empires that have controlled the feudal structure of the lands, were facing the absolutism with new challenges”.159 The only reaction against the tide of times was through force. Therefore, although the battle had been only temporarily won, it will be lost forever spiritually. The long-lasting Fürstenspiegel was spiritually waning in the newly-born social world where the feudal ties were breaking apart and would never come back again. The long-lasting inheritance of the age can be identified in the manifold steps in which the creation of the modern state in the middle of nineteenth century will use the precepts of administration by law, in spite of the side effect of stifling the autonomy of the individual and the free will of the citizen in deciding down-up the general laws of the society. Owed to the lack of a stable thriving bourgeoisie able to decide by itself the track of modernity and by a weak aristocracy, the Romanian culture will be at length subverted by the paternalistic modernization derived from the omnipotence of the modern state. The change of the cultural center from the Greek Byzantine sphere to the Western influence had been a stable transition in the long span of the eighteenth century. The production of texts and historical recordings was still a matter of public concern. The great age of Romantic individualism was yet to come for the scholar of the late-feudal social organization. “The writing is still closely tied to the political program; a scholarly study of the ancient texts, an inquiry into the relations exiting between the conceptions of diverse periods and, hence, a shift of the intellect towards the environment in which it works are second-hand issues in comparison to the urgency of building a body of documents and arguments meant to support the rights of the people and of the state. The main innovative effort is done in the historical field with the purpose of demonstrating the Latin origin of the Romanian people, that the Latin world had brought the .”160 Alexandru Duțu will reinforce the point of view he has pleaded for in other books and separate studies as well: although the inspiration of the Western enlightened ideas is not to be disputed 159 160

Ibid., p. 99. Ibid, p. 129.

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under any circumstance, the acculturation of Western models and patterns does indeed fall under the influence of the local tradition, which is “aware of its existence.”161 “The amplification of the contacts with the movements of ideas all across the continent creates the basis of a much diversified and rich culture, which is built on a cultural tradition and on a series of values that indicate a clear self-consciousness. The activity of the enlightened scholars is grounded on the long intellectual activity of the publishers who have activated in the preceding decades, in the schools which have resumed, after each calamity, the courses and renewed their study books. The enlightened scholars can recuperate a scholarly tradition, which, though not transforming into a humanist tradition (in the sense of cultivating the studia humanitatis), manages to keep alive the intellectual preoccupation and to put into writing the great expectations of the community and its purposeful values.”162 With the turn of the century, in the foot tracks of the French Army and its eastern campaigns, the Romanian principalities opened to the fresh inspiration of French political ideas, which were, nevertheless, considered too radical and outlandishly anti-feudal for the stability and cultural homogeneity of the two small kingdoms, economically still dependent on the Ottoman control. Alexandru Duțu details the connections that have been borne out of the Napoleonic campaigns and highlights, most relevantly, the process through which the Greek language – employed as the means of communication of the laic intellectual elite – would soon be replaced, on the canvas of the Romantic age, by the French-inspired educated young elites. In comparison to the French model, that will have a definite and irreversible impact at every social level on the mental framework of modern institutional Romania, the British example is largely employed by the local scholars as either a piece of good morals from where to learn or as an example of insightful role-models, such was the case with the gentleman code of conduct prescribed by Lord Chesterfield in the letters to his son, a piece of literature which was available in the 161 162

Ibid., p. 135. Ibid., p. 135.

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Principalities around 1800s. There were also readers who sought in the British example the pinnacle of the age in matters of science and technology. However, the nationalistic impetus and the cry for independence of the small nations, inspired by Western thinking at the time, triggered the affirmation of a new role-model in the region: the patriot. He belongs to a generation that is already intellectually modernized. Overall, Alexandru Duțu demonstrates carefully that there was no real mental borderline between the written works and the figurative language or the folklore in the eighteenth century and that these three dimensions crisscrossed each other even if the artist or the historian came from different social settings. The social and the mental coordinates had been so specific for the region that there is a cultural blending at every level of the homogenized mentalities. Furthermore, “the modernization process brought with it a great degree of imitation which tore many vital strings that held together the people and their original hearth, deranging the belief in the values of an authentic civilization.”163 The methodological concept that has a pivotal role in all of Alexandru Duțu’s studies is the cultural of orality before 1800, which is neither to be shallowly confused with the folkloric view (that does have its weight) or with the pre-modern historical accounts of the theological scholars. The essence of the oral culture for Alexandru Duțu lies in the overlapping of all the dynamic tendencies after 1750 in the two principalities (the Transylvanian Romanian elites are the first educated in Western patterns), even if it expresses the visual arts in the monasteries, the liturgical texts or the folkloric works of art. The cultural blending gave to the language and the society a homogeneity that does not allow a partial estimation, but a general judgment. It is the richness of this homogenous and coherent whole at the level of mentalities which, Alexandru Duțu believes, leaks into the modernization process. Although the traditions of the old order are distorted and the homogeneity is lost, the pathway of the type of modernization in

163

Alexandru Duțu, Călătorii, imagini, constante, editura Eminescu, București, 1985, p. 208.

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nineteenth century Romania is not completely imitated and transplanted from Western Europe. On the contrary: the cultural transformation, as far as the first half of the century is concerned, took care to preserve the deep layers of orality and cultural wholeness of the old society, but this was not to last. Somehow, the modernization elites proved irresponsible by not paying close attention to the late-feudal heritage of the social organism.

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Chapter 3: The “Other” in Europe The National State and Its Avatars A disconcerting obsession is present throughout many of Alexandru Duțu’s books: what it is to be European in Eastern Europe, in a cultural and ethnic area fractured by different languages and religious traditions, which often interfere either with the creation of a modern sovereign state, or with the stability of the region at large. Alexandru Duțu tries to put together a history of the mentalities at work in the region when it refers to the ways by which the modernizing wave, that had erupted and spread afar in the West at the beginning of the nineteenth century, had been perceived and employed as a means through which the self-identity of the different peoples of the East had also to gain. On the eve of modernity in Eastern Europe, the political elites of the Romanian countries at the onset of the nineteenth century had assessed the West, especially France, the German lands and the British Empire, as superior in most, if not in all respects, to the Eastern counterparts. What came first as an epistemological shock would soon turn into a matter of generational credo: the Romanian political and intellectual elites at the onset of the nineteenth century had borrowed from the West, first and foremost, the idea of the nation as the leading principle in the creation of the sovereign state and, only then, in a perfect circle, the role of the state as a guarantor of the ethnic language, the majority’s religious cult and the perpetuity of long-lasting traditions. In the design of the state itself the Romanian language, the Orthodox traditions and the ostensible permanence of old customs dating back to antiquity have all contributed their share. However, in some of Alexandru Duțu’s late articles164, this mental design was not free from feelings of insecurity and even tension in regards to the stability of these “invented traditions”, which, according to Alexandru Duțu, are the breed of the secularist ideologies imported from the Western world. Language, religion and territorial permanence were not, as might seem,

164

Alexandru Duțu, Lumea dinăuntru și lumea din afară, editura Universității din București, 2009, pp. 251-291.

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elements uncommon to most newly borne national states in the nineteenth century165. The Romanian example proves the general rule of its time, since the Serbian, Bulgarian, Greek and even Italian nation-states have been formed as sovereign independent states based on the three ideas mentioned above. The unassuming cultural traits of national identity might look baffling nowadays even if one would compare nations between themselves at the time: part of the Western idea of the nation and of the place occupied by the progressive nature of the capitalistic economy and by modern scientific public agendas would only later and, this time only feebly, enter the mindset of the Eastern nations. Alexandru Duțu’s own assessment is that the surge of secularist official rationalism found itself challenged by societies so static and traditional that it had been incomprehensible even for the elites to appreciate correctly the relevance of modern industry and urban life at the heart of the modernization process. The dynamic rhythm of life and the modern reforms of the elites in the modernizing countries of the West required a social hierarchy and social relations that would become important for the Romanian lands only later on in the nineteenth century. The West had already gained the momentum of economic development centuries before166 and the world market would be in its full swing after 1815: “The gradual transformation of a rigidly organized hierarchic system into one where man could at least attempt to shape their own life, where man gained the opportunity of knowing and choosing between different forms of life, is closely associated with the growth of commerce. From the commercial cities of northern Italy the new view of life spread with commerce to the west and north, through France and the southwest of Germany to the Low Countries and the British Isles, taking firm root wherever there was no despotic political power to stifle it. In the Low Countries and Britain it for a long time enjoyed its fullest development and for the first time had an opportunity to grow freely and to become the

165

For the particular case of the French society after 1871, as a prototype of the Western-type nation-state, see the classical study of Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen. The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914, Stanford University Press, 1976. 166 For the creation of an international market system in Western Europe before the Industrial Revolution, see the th th three-volume masterpiece of Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15 -18 Century, Harper & Row Publishers, New York, 1981.

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foundation of the social and the political life of these countries. And it was from there that in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it again began to spread in a more fully developed form to the West and East, to the New World and to the center of the European continent, where devastating wars and political oppression had largely submerged the earlier beginnings of a similar growth.”167 Moving on, the nineteenth century redefined the boundaries and the traits of the local identities in Eastern Europe. Alexandru Duțu argues in a radical different approach than the historical consensus on the matter: the local ties and the cultural fabric of the society when the Western capitalistic system had penetrated at the close of the 1820s had been slowly shattered not by the Western influence itself168, but by the reformist policies taken by the local political elites at the time when the yoke of the Ottoman Empire was weakening at a fast rate. In the last decades of the seventeenth century, there were already visible proofs that the local elites were shifting their allegiances to the sovereign powers dominating Central Europe. The spirit of communitarianism, of the civil rule by the community was not part of the Eastern Orthodox tradition. The reason for this was that, in the Orthodox mindset, the interest for worldly possessions and material accomplishment (the-outside-world) came later, in times of social and political reforms towards modernity, being overshadowed, if not crushed, by the non-historical commands of the Christian spiritual duties (the-world-from-within) with a longlasting tradition behind them. Hence, the communitarian zeal had been the byproduct of the idea of the nation, which would foster the nation-state itself in the middle of the nineteenth century. The coincidence of ethnicnation-nation-state in Eastern Europe is easily explainable by the presence of large empirestates that encompassed the small diverse populations in their realm. This circumstance will be the bud out of which the Romantic revolutionary generation will burst in 1848, supporting the ideal of creating a national state, flourishing from ethnic grounds.

167

Friedrich August von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, volume 2 of The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, The University of Chicago Press, 2007, p. 69. 168 Keith Hitchins, Românii, 1774-1866, ediția a III-a, editura Humanitas, București, 2013, pp. 78-145.

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Nevertheless, Alexandru Duțu will go even further and assess the intellectual project of designing an ancient past of the nation, which has suffered from pillage and domination in the course of centuries, only to resurrect in the modern age, under the banner of the new Westernized elite destined not only to rule the nation, but to create its first state, since the Westernized elite has self-proclaimed itself as an epitome of the will of the people. Duțu stresses the lack of scientific credibility of the left oriented theory of “invented traditions”: the traditions invented in the nineteenth century, mainly concerning the purity and the age of the nation, came against the real traditions of the peasantry, whose customs and mental structures had little in common with the enlightened and Romantic ideals of the westernized boyars. “Hence, establishing a mandatory link and reconstructing an imminent path of events from the ethnic to the National State is another way of designing a retrospective utopia.”169 And, to go on, like any other utopia, it does not possess enough “political and juridical consistency”170. The relation between the civil society and the national state has been problematic from the very beginning, a question addressed with modern methodological tools only recently by Victor Neumann171. “With the exception of a few representative figures of the 1848 generation in Walachia, I have never found the constant conscious use of the equivalents Popor with Populus (in the sense of a political and juridical community). However, the political language and the collective mentality did not develop in this direction, which will lead – among others – to the inconsistent representation of the civic-liberal orientation and the leftist orientation in the Romanian culture. In the absence of the same culture of Populus, Peuple or People, rapidly building a national identity had been paramount, the intellectuals utilized the idea of the clan. Despite the apparent similarities with the concepts of national identity, the way they are comprehended and employed in the French, English, Dutch cultures, the concept of Neam (accepted as the equivalent of Popor) is a proof that in the Romanian culture the

169

Alexandru Duțu, Ideea de Europa și evoluția conștiinței europene, editura All, București, 1999, p. 186. Ibidem. 171 Victor Neumann, Neam, popor sau națiune?, ediția a II-a, editura Curtea Veche, București, 2005, p. 134 and also Victor Neumann, Armin Heinen (editori), Istoria României prin concepte, editura Polirom, Iași, 2010, pp. 379-401. 170

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set of values which founded the idea of the modern Nation is not identical with the Western one.”172 Alexandru Duțu will also speak about a certain “utopia of recuperation”, which was, at its core, a means of creating a connection between the medieval states, shaky but long lasting, and the new modern state, designed to feature and reflect the constitutional regimes of Western European countries in the 1860s. This will represent the clash between the national state and populism. “Without a civil society there is no modern state”.173 Precisely here, according to Alexandru Duțu, the link between the nation-state and the society per se is broken. “Hence, it is useful to search the way in which the relation, in the nineteenth century, between the organic and organized solidarities has been accomplished. This relation has shifted the balance either to intimate lifestyles (from liberalism to fundamentalism) or to the public ones (from pluralism to dictatorship), while nationalism has justified, like a chameleon, either the individual identity and the legitimation of the power or the patriotic fervor and the aggressive national politics. Nationalism had been introduced in the footsteps of the culture, where the two types of solidarities are supposed to meet: organic and organized.”174 What constitutes the main threat to the creation of the modern state, based on the backbone of a civil society, is the way the state had legitimized itself in the nineteenth century175. “Moreover, even in the nineteenth century, the legitimacy of the State had been created through the means of the folklore: starting with the cultural legacy, especially rural, a mythology will be borne that will block the path of any coherent political doctrine. The folkloric popular will is not the common will from the Western , but a way of addressing the communitarian spirit, set on the masses. Hence, the rustic utopia 172

Ibidem. Alexandru Duțu, Ideea de Europa și evoluția conștiinței europene, editura All, București, 1999, p. 186. 174 Ibid., p. 187. 175 The best-case scenario for the process of nation building is the groundbreaking work on France by Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchman. The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914, Stanford University Press, 1976. 173

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intensely highlighted in the communist societies which justified the destruction of the elites and the stability of a cultural level acceptable for the in possession of a rudimentary doctrine.”176 Another chasm set at the beginning of the modern Romanian state is the dichotomy between modernism and tradition. According to Alexandru Duțu there are particular attributes that make the modernization process in south-eastern Europe challenging and different from the Western examples. “The ideology of the national has selected elements from the past and has favored the against individual liberties and the individual improvement stipulated by the religious tradition and by the Western doctrines which were starting to get known and understood in the nineteenth century.”177 The pseudo-patriotic nationalism had been instilled in every detail of the civil life as part of a national agenda that would foster the development of a modern state capable to modernize the whole society beneath. Had this been a realistic assessment of the top-down modernization process? Alexandru Duțu stresses the fact there had been no genuine progress in terms of social development, both for the urban minority or the vast majority of the rural population, since the Western import of reformist ideas was not likened to the social and political circumstances around 1850 in the Romanian lands. The modernization process had been “laic” and directed against the boyars who, despite “their abuses and shallow compromises, have helped the survival of the political structures of the Romanian society.” 178 Local solidarities, tightened during generations, had been destroyed by a modernization erected on “the , the abstraction entitled , the antagonism between the individual and the State”179. By casting aside the metaphysical root within the social body, the road to modern ideologies had thus been paved.

176

Ibid., p. 188. Ibid., p. 189. 178 Ibid., p. 192 179 Ibidem. 177

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Nonetheless, the road to modernity will revert later on into radical social movements, such as the far-right political group of the interwar period (the Legion of the Archangel Michael or, as it was later denominated, the Iron Guard180), “which pretended to borrow values from the past, making a turn towards Orthodoxy and continuing the old forms of solidarities, a term which is used frequently by the traditionalists, including Nae Ionescu. However, the mystic embraced by the Legion’s believers is not the orthodox one, but one of Rhenish inspiration, with a special accent on the that might enhance the mystical experience and with a suspicious adoration for sacrificial practices, which, ostensibly, come from the past, reinstating pagan rituals”.181 This anti far-right stance is a way through which the entire traditional ethos is cleansed from any distortions and ideological misdemeanors. Alexandru Duțu will also tackle the issues of the nationalistic xenophobic elements in the communist period, especially after 1970, when distorted traditions were reinstalled in order to legitimize the political power of the general secretary and the political elite. The mystification of the national history was a confiscation of the real traditions by the state institutions to their own benefit, which was to manipulate, through a locally-bred ideology, the social discourse on the past. “The new organism established by the national ideology was not grounded on the personal link between the ruler and the subject, on the administration of a space, on accepting a Christian ideal”.182 According to Duțu, the intellectual legacy of the Orthodox Church had been largely dragged into the political realm by nationalism. A certain “historiographical

180

The best available sources on the subject are Armin Heinen, Legiunea , editura Humanitas, București, 2006, Mihai Chioveanu, Fețele fascismului, editura Universității din București, 2005, pp. 225322, Leon Volovici, Nationalist Ideology and Anti-Semitism. The Case of Romanian Intellectuals in the 1930s, Pergamon Press, New York, 1991, Zigu Ornea, Anii treizeci. Extrema dreaptă românească, editura Fundației Culturale Române, București, 1996. For a broader perspective, see Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1996, Roger G. Griffin, International Fascism. Theories, Causes and the New Consensus, Oxford University Press, 1998. 181 Alexandru Duțu, Ideea de Europa și evoluția conștiinței europene, editura All, București, 1999, p. 193. 182 Ibid., p. 229.

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anachronism”183 coalesced against the ecumenical meaning of the Church, which would fall into the trap of the modern nationalistic bait. “The proof of the secularization initiated by the new national State and which clearly demanded the Church that it serve, by , the new State, together with the army, the city hall and the school. The Church had been cast aside from the public life and was only invited to the celebrations dedicated to the national State.”184 Even during the Communist regime, officially atheistic, the situation would not alter. “Secondly, during the communist regime, the nationalism imposed from above by the political power has deepened the isolation of the country and the dependency of the Church, in political matters, on the State. This regime had led to the politicization of the Church185: after the Romanian society had been subjected to the predominance of the political life, starting with the nineteenth century onwards, religion has gone under the control of the power, during the Communist age, which desired to destroy the Church.”186 Alexandru Duțu’s belief is that in order to counteract the influence of modern ideologies on the legacy of the past there is a need to rediscover the two dimensions of the individual in a modern secular society: “…man lives on two levels – one is the daily living, the other is the eternal – and does not live a double life – with different rules, one for the public life, the other for the private; the daily life is commanded by the great aspiration for completeness.”187 Apparently, the “dual citizenship” of the Christian188 “can solve not only the terrible heritage of communist totalitarianism, which was the duplicity, but also the functioning of fundamental institutions: the family, the school, the parliament, in which one must naturally bind personal responsibility and solidarity, the correctness and the flexibility that can offer anyone the chance to develop personally. The 183

Ibidem. Ibidem. 185 Cristian Vasile, Biserica Ortodoxă Română în primul deceniu comunist, editura Curtea Veche, București, 2005. 186 Ibidem. 187 Ibid., p. 231 188 Alexandru Duțu, Political Models and National Identities in 'Orthodox' Europe, Babel Publishing House [Studia Politica], Bucharest, 1998. 184

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double citizenship can halt the survival of the communist nationalism in the guise of orthodox triumphalism.”189 The question of what is a genuine identity will be a constant subject of many articles following the fall of the old order in 1989. Alexandru Duțu will reconstruct a certain phenomenology of the individual identity in relation with the society and the state. “We consider it useful to make a necessary division between the immediate identities and the amplified identities which coexist, since they do not show up in an organized succession, such as we encounter in the supposed evolutionism that would take us to the heavenly earth. The immediate identities seem to be founded on the organic and organized patriotisms. The first type of patriotism stems from the natural bond between men and the land they live on; sharing common words, the family ties and the lost ones build up a strong solidarity, both positive and negative.”190 The positive aspect worth mentioning is the inner feeling of comfort in belonging to a certain social order, which, for Alexandru Duțu, has its grassroots in tradition and the past. “The negative [aspect] is that the organic patriotism is able to become exclusivist and invade the sphere of the organized patriotism”.191 Hence, one has to cope with the growing xenophobic core within most radical ideologies or political movements, which are set to eliminate and destroy any endogenic or foreign-borne imagined foe. Alexandru Duțu adds that “this is not related to phenomena which originate in a rudimentary human consciousness, since the aggressive patriotism is not only present in the case of gregarious personalities, unable to think in other terms that outward violence, but also in refined types, who

189

Ibid., p. 232 Alexandru Duțu, Lumea dinăuntru și lumea din afară, editura Universității din București, 2009, pp. 256-257. 191 Ibidem 190

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combine their arrogance with contempt for any forms of civilization other than their own.”192 Different roads to modernity Before engaging into the task of clearly addressing the conceptual issues stated by Alexandru Duțu, one needs to bring forward the history behind the debate of the modernization process in Romania. Even since the second half of the nineteenth century, the level of intensity in the public intellectual debate has focused on the question: what to borrow from the Western civilization? The quantity and the quality of the imported ideas were at stake in the overall debate, rather than the answer to the question. The psychological feeling of inferiority and backwardness had been a constant element of the local political and intellectual elites during the nineteenth century, although, as we will see, the intellectual atmosphere around 1900s would accept other perspectives as well, but still as a reaction to the self-perception of being inferior, subdued and marginal. The basic dichotomy present at the level of the elites had been the division between culture and civilization, a debate that would last until the period between the two world wars. The liberal camp, represented by the boyars who fought for the rights of the 1848 Revolution in the Romanian lands (who were educated in the spirit of the French revolutionary protest against old traditions and social structures, but who were deep republicans in their political requests193) has sided along the path of civilizing from top-down the society of the two kingdoms. Whether it was a realistic political program or not, the French-educated boyars had largely imported civilized institutions from the west and applied them to the social and economic conditions present in the two principalities. Since there was only one elite, id est the boyars, any opposition would come only from the elite itself, considering the low development of the urban life and hence the feeble potential of a dissenting bourgeoisie. After gaining international recognition under a foreign king in 1866, a member of the traditional royal 192

Ibidem For a more recent detailed analysis, though critical of the 1848 liberal stance, see Sorin Antohi, Civitas Imaginalis. Istorie și utopie în cultura română, editura Polirom, Iași, 1999, pp. 20-116 and, for a general perpective on the historical period, see Apostol Stan, Grupări şi curente politice în România între Unire şi Independenţă (18591877), editura Ştiinţifică şi Enciclopedică, București, 1979. 193

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families in Europe, the new Romanian state addressed the exact policies of the liberal boyars, who were willing to impose modern structures and institutions from above in the hope that by fostering a state-controlled modernization process the society itself would eventually become economically prosperous, made up of urban dwellers and divided along consistent social classes. This has undoubtedly been the liberal dream of the nineteenth century in many, if not most, eastern European societies. Factionalism, however, was at the time inevitable, since the state was constitutionally liberal. Among the first dissenters to the general scheme had been an intellectual group, consisting mostly of either rich landowners (boyars) or representatives of the state apparatus (university professors) or the liberal arts (lawyers, doctors, journalists, etc.), which built a whole sociological critique to the wave of modernizing by importing Western civilizational patters after 1866. The intellectual group has been of primordial importance in the creation of local schools of thought in the second half of the nineteenth century and has received the attention of many scholars and academics, Junimea.194 The most prominent members of the intellectual circle have overemphasized the quintessential place occupied by the local culture in its ability to organically absorb the Western civilization schemes in the period 1863-1900, when the intellectual significance of the group would melt away in the face of other prospects and intellectual factions195. The intellectual leaders of Junimea (Titu Maiorescu, P. P. Carp, Vasile Pogor, Theodor Rosetti and Iacob Negruzzi in the first few years, followed by Mihai Eminescu, Vasile Conta, A. D. Xenopol in the period before 1890) had all benefited from the ideological influence of the German and the Habsburg educational systems in their youth, which, in contrast to the liberals of the 1848 generation who had studied in France, were different in many respects from the radical and revolutionary zeal of the French-inspired Romanian elite. “But beyond the already mentioned similarities and the pertinent mutual appreciation, there is no close relation between the generation of ’48 and Junimea. On the contrary, the division is wide and there is no possibility of reconciliation. It is not only about a 194

Zigu Ornea, Junimea și junimismul, editura Eminescu, București, 1978. Sorin Alexandrescu, ‘Junimea, discurs politic și discurs cultural', în Privind înapoi, modernitatea, București, Editura Univers, 1999. 195

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temperamental discrepancy between a Messianic enthusiastic orientation, in favor of grand statements, generous to the point of self-oblivion in its ideals, and a clear-headed skeptical one, despising big words, in possession of different social and national convictions, though highly-stated as well.”196 In legal terms, the members of Junimea were in favor of a constitutional system in the manner of the historical legalistic explanations of the German Historical School, represented by Friedrich Carl von Savigny197. Hence, Junimea believed no legal system will be useful and modernizing if it does not correspond to the state of civilization and history of the nation where it is meant to be functional. Implicitly, the imported legal system and the Western-inspired Constitution could not be of any public use in a country where the nation at large had no word and no influence in the public decision-making. The French-educated elites erected the liberal national state of Western inspiration in the absence of any reasonable consultation of the people and its local environment. In political terms, gradual development, based on solid grounds and national roots, was, for Junimea, the only option against radical reforms and revolutionary changes, publicly expressed by the liberals. The model of the French revolution was again the example to which the Junimea group did not adhere, given their respect to the British slow reformism expressed in Edmund Burkes’ Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) or the importance of tradition and old customs in the organic evolution of a civilization expressed in the unfinished History of Civilization in England by Henry Thomas Buckle198. At the same time, owed to their German background, the representatives of Junimea, who would later on occupy high positions in the administration of the Romanian kingdom, envisaged the age of mechanization, of rationalization of daily life as a menace to the culture of the nation, especially when that nation had little in common with the rate or the nature of the

196

Zigu Ornea, Junimea și junimismul, editura Eminescu, București, 1978, p. 187. “Savigny, the founder and the greatest theorist of the Historical School of Jurisprudence, and a convinced and rabid anti-liberal, was by far the most distinguished defender of Prussian absolutism in the nineteenth century. He was not a Hegelian in the strict sense, but agreed with the School in rejecting equally the theory of natural rights and of utilitarianism, and interpreted law historically, as a continuous, orderly, traditional development springing from, and justified by, the ideals and character of a given nation in its historical surroundings”, Sir Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx, New York, Oxford University Press, 1959, p. 66. 198 Ioan Stanomir, Junimismul și pasiunea moderației, editura Humanitas, 2013, pp. 23-49. 197

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development in the modern industrializing world199. In other words, the literary and the future political group of Junimea had been the critical skeptics within the liberal Romanian elite of the mid-nineteenth century, making them mild reforms, stable adherents to progress and strong admirers of the cultural legacy and, generally, classical liberals on the British model, that is conservative. “However, the basic principles of the conception according to which between culture and the forms of civilization a chasm spreads out and that the evolution of the latter is always the result of borrowing foreign models, affecting the primary, stable and conservative content of the culture are easily detectable within the Junimea.”200 Both Titu Maiorescu and P. P. Carp, in the parliamentary discourses of the 1870s and late 1880s, will firmly state their disbelief in the existence of any social compact at the origin of society and affirm their adherence to the natural state, fostered by traditions and the organic development of the society, against the contractual state, which is a figment of the French revolutionary imagination in the late eighteenth century201. Thus, Junimea, at the crossroads of German “reactionary” ideology of von Savigny in jurisprudence, of Edmund Burke in matters of political principles, of Herbert Spencer’s denial of socialism, of Darwin’s theory as far as the natural science is concerned, of pessimistic Romantic estheticism as found in the works of Arthur Schopenhauer assembles together a motley crew of inspirations and hindsight. The most inspiring social critique, dressed up as a cultural one, for the Romanian intellectuals in the latter part of the nineteenth century and continuing even further is the article of Titu Maiorescu of 1868, În contra direcției de azi în cultura română202. Although the main lines of the criticism will be also present in some of the parliamentary discourses of prominent conservative politicians in the 1870s and 1880s203, Titu Maiorescu’s article will have an

199

Ion Bulei, Conservatori și conservatorism în România, editura Enciclopedica, 2000. Zigu Ornea, Junimea și junimismul, editura Eminescu, București, 1978, p. 174. 201 Laurențiu Vlad (editor), Conservatorismul românesc, editura Nemira, 2006, pp. 42-47, pp. 64-74, pp. 153-166, pp. 194-202 and Ioan Stanomir, Laurențiu Vlad (editors), A fi conservator, editura Meridiane, 2002, pp. 47-56, pp. 68-84, pp. 219-224, pp. 245-250, pp. 286-289, pp. 307-312, pp. 418-420, pp. 452-482. 202 Titu Maiorescu, Critice, vol. I, editura pentru Literatură, București, 1967, pp. 143-155. 203 Cf. footnote 30 above. 200

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enormous influence in the cultural debate for at least half a century. Apparently, the fault of the Romanian elites, the boyars and the newly-founded state apparatus (from the legislative, judicial and executive branches to public schools, universities, museums, all the paraphernalia of a modern nineteenth century bourgeois society such as France or Germany), was that of implementing a social design that showed signs of inefficiency and lacked any social cohesion. It was all exterior form, void of any realistic content, “forms without substance”. The national weak middle classes were not prepared to absorb the lifestyle of a modern society without distorting the intentions and the meaning of the imported institutions. Adapting the modern import of political and administrative policies to a backward rural society implied either that the social design was not rooted in the society itself (and hence the fake public life of the modern Romanian state, where there were all the appearances of a modern state in spite of the archaic society per se) or that, in the course of time, the Western government and public life will creep into the society beneath and modernize it slowly but decisively. The form was the social civilization in Romania and the content stands for the culture of the wide people. Foreigninspired civilization and culture were struggling to modernize Romania. Titu Maiorescu never hints to a solution to the weak process of modernization in the Romanian lands: at most, the scholar and future prime minister desires the eradication of the pseudo-modernization process present within the political elites of the time and founding again the state on different grounds. At the same time, Maiorescu never addresses the sociological question of what were the economic reasons behind the fake modernization of the Romanians. The posterity of his criticism is immense204. The most prevalent dismissal (from the articles on the form-content dichotomy of his contemporary A. D. Xenopol to Eugen Lovinescu’s work, Istoria civilizației române moderne205, in 1924-1925 or even Stefan Zeletin’s Burghezia română206 in 1925 and Neoliberalismul207 in 1927) was that the state itself was “young” and that it always takes time to create the civilization process that commenced generations before 204

For a Marxist overview, though extremely well documented, Henri H. Stahl, Gânditori și curente de istorie socială românească, ed. de Paul H. Stahl, editura Universității din București, 2001. 205 Eugen Lovinescu, Istoria civilizației române moderne, editura Minerva, București, 1997. 206 Ștefan Zeletin, Burghezia română. Originea și rolul său istoric, editura Humanitas, București, 2006. 207 Ștefan Zeletin, Neoliberalismul. Studii asupra istoriei și politicii burgheziei române, ed. de Ionel Nicu Sava, editura Ziua, București, 2005.

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in the Western world: the capitalistic middleclass did not yet had a firm grip on the economy. The deficient aspects of a fast modernization process, directed and imposed from above, were inevitable. In the best-case scenario, the state will foster through its institutions the means and social conditions out of which a prosperous urban bourgeoisie would stem and the lower echelons of society would profit economically and socially as well208. The organic growth of the Romanian society will be tolerated and accepted by Titu Maiorescu himself as a feasible path to modernity in his political speeches in the following decades, when he will join the largely liberal political consensus as a member of the Parliament and even share the public dignity of becoming a minister in both conservative and liberal governments209. However, the debate on the Romanian civilization was still premature. The last quarter of a century will bring to the fore other perspectives on the issues of the formcontent antinomy in the public life of the Romanian kingdom. Around the 1900s, the Romanian society was economically largely preindustrial when most of the population lived in the rural area, working for the large landowners in the agricultural sector. The level of illiteracy and poverty were typical anywhere in the world for any sort of agrarian economy. In terms of any significant sociological change, there are but a few contrasts between the 1860s, when Titu Maiorescu first formulated his critical stance, and the 1900s: the urban life did increase steadily, but not firmly, the state apparatus had spread in the territory in such a way that by this time the level of centralization of the public administration had been accomplished, but the industrial capacity was lagging far behind most Western and Central European countries. Romania was still trapped in an agricultural social structure: a weak urban middleclass, an almost non-existent industrial working class and a large peasantry, making up for almost 80% of the Romanians. The forms were still prevalent while the substance was generally missing.210

208

Victor Rizescu, Tranziții discursive, editura Corint, București, 2012, pp. 23-173. For an excellent biography of Titu Maiorescu, see Zigu Ornea, Ediția a II-a, Viața lui Titu Maiorescu, editura Du Style, București, 1997, two volumes. 210 For the economic data on the subject, see Bogdan Murgescu, România și Europa, editura Polirom, Iași, 2010, pp. 103-205. 209

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In the intellectual atmosphere of the age, new forms of criticism have gained momentum. One is the Russian-inspired movement of the Narodinks or Narodism (agrarian socialists)211, which in Romania will be covered by the word Poporanism212. It was basically an intellectual dismissal of the road to modernity on which the society was slowly moving: since the peasantry was the only economic and social representative class of Romania, the national peasant should be the sole subject of intellectual and political debate213. The landowners are to be indirectly blamed for the poor standard of living and lack of any political rights of the peasantry, the most exploited social class from which the state apparatus was collecting most of the taxes. Apparently socialist in its quest for establishing cooperative farms for the peasantry, the Poporanist movement, singled out by Constantin Stere and Garabet Ibrăileanu214, rejected the capitalist consensus of the West. The commercial ties to Central and Western Europe after the Treaty of Adrianople (1828-1829) had hindered the peaceful traditional life of the peasantry, now subjected to capitalist exploitation and physical misery. All the elements of a rural utopia are detectable in the Poporanist credo: the preservation of folkloric traditions and old customs while the economic predominance of the boyars, depicted as neo-feudal lords, is cast aside for a virtually impossible economic order of rich, middle and poor peasants, living in a fictitious Romanian Arcadia. The secularist modernizing project turns into a hindering myth for the new school of thought. Whether Poporanism was reactionary or not is not a dilemma to clear here: it was expressively set against the political ideals of the 1848 political elite and had nothing in common to the moderate liberal criticism of Junimea. However, since the Poporanist conception did not involve a harsh assessment of the place occupied by the modernizing institutions of the Romanian state, Constantin Stere, the leader of the Poporanist intellectual faction, will join the ranks of the Liberal Party and, by 1914, the Poporanist credo will melt away in some of the prospects of

211

th

Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialists Movements in 19 Century Russia, Phoenix Press, 2001. 212 Zigu Ornea, Poporanismul, editura Minerva, București, 1972, pp. 151-255 and pp. 423-505. 213 For a similar movement, with Romantic ideals at its core, Zigu Ornea, Sămănatorismul, editura Minerva, București, 1971, pp. 125-227. 214 Zigu Ornea, Viața lui Constantin Stere, editura Cartea Românească, București, volumes I and II, 1989-1991.

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land reform of the liberal side, which will become a reality after the First World War. Some of the moderate Poporanist ideas will carry their weight in the interwar period in the principles of the Romanian Peasant Party, but, again, the parochially utopian criticism of the movement had little to say to a large intellectual consensus on the road to modernity taken by Romania: it had to be Western, liberal and capitalistic. Other more radical ideas in the Poporanist side, such as the workings of religion in the Romanian society and its expression in the daily life of the organic community, will be incorporated and receive new impetus in the far-right movement of the Iron Guard215. Why did Poporanism spring in the Romanian society after half a century of reforms and changes of Western inspiration? Two possible answers come to mind: one is that Titu Maiorescu’s gloomy analysis of the Romanian political life in the late 1860s (from issues pertaining to the defective spirit of constitutionalism to the daily functioning of the state institutions) is indeed true and that the possible creation of the Western forms by eroding the (and, in a sound circle, the unstoppable modernization transition will be finally completed when the Western forms will organically replace the local fake forms) is uncertain and a classical induction of wishful thinking. The optimistic viewpoint of a modern civilization in Romania, expressed by Eugen Lovinescu216, is then a dead-end: transplanted forms cannot create a genuine substance, but mostly a hybrid. Some minor remarks are necessary at this point to comprehend the hermeneutical tools employed by Eugen Lovinescu’s study in its ambition to describe the birth and the growth of the “modern Romanian civilization”. The basic tenet is that the Marxist materialist doctrine, with its stringent prominence given to questions of economy that deterministically decide the entire social consciousness expressed in laws, customs, habits, mentalities, religious faiths and axiological systems, cannot adequately explain the Romanian process of Europeanization after 1848217. Eugen Lovinescu, in the footpaths of Constantin-Dobrogeanu Gherea’s book of 1910, Neoiobăgia, argues critically that the bourgeois liberal values, the republican revolutionary 215

For the importance of the middle strata in the creation of democracy, see Barrington Moore, Jr, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, Penguin University Books, 1974, pp. 413-433. 216 Eugen Lovinescu, Istoria civilizației române moderne, editura Minerva, București, 1997. 217 Ibidem, pp. 14-26.

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doctrine of the Romanian elite, preeminently the boyars of Wallachia, imposed itself in the two principalities in the absence of any social organization that was prepared to absorb them organically. The rural feudal character of the Romanian economic productivity, which, concedes Eugen Lovinescu, was similar to “twelfth century” France218, should have been an unsurpassable drawback in the quest for modernity of the local elites. However, the historical facts proved otherwise: although “reactionary” in the case of the slow-paced temperamentally conservative Moldavian elites in the period between 1840-1870, the general political consensus of the Romanian boyars responded correctly to the foreign pressures of modernity coming from the West219. The legal reality, as Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea would describe it, imposed itself from top to bottom, without being an “anomaly”. For Lovinescu there is a saeculum or a Zeitgeist that synchronizes mentalities across different nations, which, although Lovinescu never makes it clear what this Zeitgeist is really made of, had its open source in the increased interdependence of the European countries after 1850220. The Romanian society was caught in the middle between large empires, but the liberal capitalistic mindset of the more materially advanced societies of Western Europe was the Zeitgeist of the nineteenth century. No society could escape the pressures of a world market and the expanse of modern industrial activity. The Romanian countries were no exception to the rule. That is precisely the cause behind the inner passion for imitation in the two Romanian principalities after 1848. Eugen Lovinescu’s attempt to place cultural values before the primacy of economic dependency stands at odds with the Marxist interpretation of history. Cultural forms could eventually be filled with civilizational content. Whereas in the particular case of France or England it took centuries for the economic relations to develop in such way that the legal and the cultural strata transformed as an effect, the countries that have experienced a long economic backwardness do not necessarily have to pass through the same evolutionary steps 221. Apparently, Eugen Lovinescu reverses the Marxist doctrine of historical deterministic phases. Now, the legacy of the more advanced countries, in terms of civilization, is reusable. As long as 218

Ibidem, p. 82. Ibidem, pp. 31-69. 220 Ibidem, pp. 76-80. 221 Ibidem, pp. 117-120. 219

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the elites are synchronized with the ideas of the West, the knowledge they possess transform them in actual civilizational heroes. The lower orders of society, the overall economic exchanges are all caught in the process of reforms because of the Western enlightened elite’s visionary plans and revolutionary activity. It seems that, writing in the first decade after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Eugen Lovinescu strongly believed that the vanguard of bourgeois liberalism was the small class of boyars in the Romanian principalities in midnineteenth century. Their zealous tasks would pave the establishment of a new society. At the same time, Eugen Lovinescu’s critical stance gives much credit to the importance of ideas in fashioning the reality of future generations222. Cultural models, where they do not exist, have to be created as to secure the survival of the society, which could not endogenously invent its own set of modern ideas. This is the reason behind Eugen Lovinescu wholly embracing the political principals of the 1848 Revolution, which, though advanced, are the product of the French liberal thinking in the two Principalities. The conservatives are also entitled to call themselves liberal, but they represent the reactionary class of large landowners, who would need to reform the state in order for the society to attempt the industrialization process since the Zeitgeist does not allow otherwise. Of course, for Eugen Lovinescu, the basic contrast between the form and content, between Western imported ideas and the real social relations in Romania is indisputable223. There is no reason why not to accept a social context that has been observed by ideological factions which, manifestly, do not share too much in common. Both Titu Maiorescu and Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea are right when they extoll the social development of modern industrialized European centers, but both are to Eugen Lovinescu at least partly wrong in their personal analysis. Titu Maiorescu is held accountable for bitterly criticizing a bourgeois society, which was in its infancy at the time Junimea reacted in 1868, but that which would, given the dynamic and unceasing cultural interdependency between the European nations, turn into a capitalistic bourgeoisie later on. To Eugen Lovinescu, Titu Maiorescu is a conservative and thus belongs to the so-called camp of the “reactionary forces” in the national history. On the other side of the 222 223

Ibidem, pp. 99-106. Ibidem, pp. 188-194.

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political spectrum, Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea is judged as being too much obsessed with the economic realities of Romania and, in retrospect, minimizing the public utility of modern ideas and principles in the affairs of the society224. Culture had preceded the economic development in the case of the Romanian society. To Eugen Lovinescu it is a proven historical fact that, as long as the Romanian political elite sets itself on the course of the bourgeois modern society, it will only be a matter of generations before the Western forms will naturally give birth to a Western substance. Eugen Lovinescu is an optimist reformer and, at the time Istoria civilizației moderne române had been published, he considers that part of the modernization transition had been already largely completed. However, what Eugen Lovinescu’s sociological and cultural history employs rather without explaining are the very word “nation” or the phrase “the national specificity”, even “race”, all being concepts which carry a good load of essentialism225. For what we have gathered, it seems that every culture has to find its specific trait in the course of interiorizing the bourgeois liberal civilization. This might be a “law” of history. The Romanian case managed again to provide no exception to the general rule. Ernest Gellner talks about a “self-deception” originating in the historiographical nationalist consensus of the nineteenth century and followed by its ideological replicas in the wars of the twentieth century: “The basic deception and self-deception practiced by nationalism is this: nationalism is, essentially, the general imposition of a high culture on society, where previously low cultures had taken up the lives of the majority, and in some cases of the totality, of the population. It means that generalized diffusion of a school-mediated, academy-supervised idiom, codified for the requirements of reasonably precise bureaucratic and technological communication. It is the establishment of an anonymous, impersonal society, with mutually substitutable atomized individuals, held together above all by a shared culture of this kind, in place of a previous complex structure of local groups, sustained by folk cultures

224 225

Ibidem, pp. 166-175. Ibidem, pp. 43-48.

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reproduced locally and idiosyncratically by the micro-groups themselves. That is what really happens.”226 This is in complete disagreement to what nationalism pretends to be: the preservation in a modern state of a sense of folk culture, ingrained in long-lasting traditions. For Gellner, the industrial modern state could not eliminate the “alien high culture” without replacing it by an invented tradition, “though admittedly one which will have some links with the earlier folk styles and dialects.” The process of building a new collective identity coincides with the process of nation building227. Nations are no more natural than any other conceptual tool plotted in the laboratory of the social sciences and used by the modern state228. To Eugen Lovinescu, the Romanian society had not been able to acquire its self-identity properly. The Romanian “race” is yet to be discovered. The prominence given to the “national specificity” or even “race” (the term has negative connotations nowadays, but in the mid-1920s Eugen Lovinescu’s liberal stance uses race as a metaphysical concept, no more different than the vague expression ) testifies to how much the nation-state concept had invaded the cultural debate as far as the years between the two great world wars229. For a staunch liberal thinker such as Eugen Lovinescu, the acceptance of the “race” in his own discourse could be a good evaluator of how radical were the anti-liberal ideologues in the 1920-30s when using the word.

226

Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, Cornell University Press, 2009, p. 57. The question of nationalism as a theoretical tool in explaining the modernization process has been tackled recently in Romania by Victor Rizescu, Tranziții discursive, editura Corint, București, 2012, pp. 179-206. 228 For the importance of nationalism in the Romanian state-building process, see Adrian Cioflânca, ‘Naționalism și parohialism în competiție’, în Dumitru Ivănescu, Cătălin Turliuc, Florin Cântec (editors), Vârstele Unirii. De la conștiința etnică la unitatea națională, Fundația Academică “A.D. Xenopol”, Iași, 2001, pp. 109-134. 229 On the subject of nations and nationalism, see Hans Kohn, Nationalism: Its Meaning and History, Robert E. Krieger Publishing Co, 1982, Prophets and peoples: Studies in nineteenth century nationalisms, Octagon Books, London, 1972, Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalisms, Cornell University Press, 2009, Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, Harvard University Press, 1993, Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Verso, 2006, Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge University Press, 2012, Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalisms since 1780, Cambridge University Press, 2012, Elie Kedourie, Nationalism, Wiley-Blackwell, 1993, Peter F. Sugar, (ed.), Eastern European Nationalism in the Twentieth Century, The American University Press, Washington, 1995, Peter F. Sugar, Ivo J. Lederer (eds.), Nationalism in Eastern Europe, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1994. 227

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Nevertheless, two different criticisms are to be raised against Eugen Lovinescu’s overall record of the “Romanian civilization”. One of them is related to the critical evaluation of Titu Maiorescu and his school in Istoria civilizației române moderne. Junimea was also responsible for the cultural criticism of the Romanian civilization, but it was exactly the cultural hybrid, which was an anomaly dissimilar to the Western pattern, that attracted the attention of Titu Maiorescu. The public life of the Romanian kingdom was obviously not the same as the public culture in the British Empire, France or Austro-Hungary in the interval 1850-1914. The intellectual and scientific life of all the above-mentioned societies was not only richer and more diverse than the one of the Romanian intelligentsia, but also different in substance and even in form. Titu Maiorescu’s firm stance was that the forms were not properly borrowed and that is why he bitterly demanded in some of his articles their complete elimination by means of a fundamental reform. New forms had to replace the erroneous ones230. Undoubtedly, Titu Maiorescu was demanding too much from a political and cultural elite in its first infant days of modernity, but it had been exactly the lack of the correct imported forms that troubled the members of Junimea. Their theoretical nihilistic criticism has its own raison d'etre and its sound logic given the shabby modern foundations of the state and society in Romania. Eugen Lovinescu presupposes that the six decades which separate his history from the actual time when Junimea was at its critical acme had witnessed the progress of the modern forms in Romania and that the liberal bourgeois society was a living reality. Nowhere in Istoria civilizației române moderne does Eugen Lovinescu address the question of how much did the Romanian society turn into a modern one by 1920, if indeed it actually did. This is a shortcoming of the whole demonstration and, in the light of the far-right political parties and of the absolute power bestowed upon the monarch Carol al II-lea during the fourth decade of the twentieth century, it might indicate that Romania was not a liberal bourgeois modern society after all in the mid-1920s, when Eugen Lovinescu has written his own historical account on local modernization.

230

Eugen Lovinescu, Istoria civilizației române moderne, editura Minerva, București, 1997, pp. 188-203.

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The second criticism has as its point of reference the so-called economically centered articles and books by Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea. Though Eugen Lovinescu is familiarized with the basic concepts of the Marxist ideology, he dismisses the absolute importance of capitalistic relations in explaining the Romanian modernization in the nineteenth century. To Eugen Lovinescu, the cultural relevance of the French-educated boyars of the 1840s generation proves that culture predates and overwhelms the economic sphere231. How was it possible for a generation to create a modern Romanian state when there was no trace of a modern bourgeois middleclass in the two principalities powerful enough as to press for reforms on the aristocrats? Capitalistic exchanges were scarce. Commerce, founded on a standard currency, was hardly a noteworthy presence in the Romanian villages, mostly assimilated to the social practice of barter. How come that the feudal lords decide all of a sudden to adopt the Western life and public administration within the boundaries of a modern state? The answers to these questions are given by Eugen Lovinescu himself, but he does not wish to incorporate them in the cultural paradigm lest the economic Weltanschauung might intrude into the general explanation. The boyars were feudal lords on the local market, but capitalist producers when exporting cereals to Central and Western Europe in the first decades of the nineteenth century 232. In an interdependent capitalist market, Eugen Lovinescu might agree that the two-system economic reality is doomed to vanish. The feudal ties had been eroded by the Western capitalist market in the European East because of the political instability of the Ottoman Empire, which was, as all historians know retrospectively, in the course of its decline. The political rationale behind the creation of a modern Romanian nation was also that there was a risk for the two principalities to get incorporated into the Russian Empire between 1820-1850, which was expanding towards the south, to the Caucasus. This would have brought not only the Russification of the rural population, as experienced in Bessarabia after 1812, but also the decrease of the economic and political power for the boyars as well within a centralized autocratic Empire. Hence, the spread of capitalist markets to Eastern Europe had been primordial in the Romanian nobility’s decision 231 232

Ibidem, pp. 166-175. Keith Hitchins, Românii 1776-1866, ediția a III-a, editura Humanitas, București, 2013, pp. 78-145.

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to join the Western European civilization. It was, among other cultural items, a fight for survival. Eugen Lovinescu does not doubt the importance of capitalism at the time, but he underestimates it. At the same time, following the year 1866, the Romanian society did not develop its own fullfledged bourgeoisie233. The level of industrialization by 1914 was extremely down sided by comparison to other European countries in the decades before the outbreak of First World War. The capitalist world system did not create substantial changes in the Romanian society. Eugen Lovinescu talks about a Romanian bourgeoisie after 1866, but he does not ever describe it. Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea dismissed the existence of a stable Romanian bourgeoisie in 1910, since there was pretty much no industrial activity in the Romanian cities, still undersized in terms of population and economic importance. The causes were to be found partly in the Agrarian Reform of 1864, partly in the political elite, composed of large landowners respectively, as we will soon see. Once again, not even in respect to economic matters, bourgeois culture did not endorse a bourgeois economy, on the Western European model. Was the Romanian civilization completed by 1925 or not? How come that the modernization process was still open to the same debate as in 1866, the clash between Western liberal values and institutions and a backward society where feudal traits were still present and rural poverty widespread? Unfortunately, for all its brilliance, Istoria civilizației române moderne is subject to the inner limits of the cultural analysis advanced by Eugen Lovinescu. The other solution is to be looked for elsewhere: what if the fake forms of modernization are in fact authentic and they express better the national substance than any other element? What are in fact these pseudo-modern achievements, which seem to fit in the general structure of the society? To turn back to Titu Maiorescu, so much like most other critics of modernity in the second half of the nineteenth century, he never searches for sound economic explanations. The anti-socialist stance of Junimea in the 1870s and 1880s will turn into a refusal of any sociological explanation of the particularities of the Romanian case.

233

Mihai Bărbulescu, Dennis Deletant, Keith Hitchins, Șerban Papacostea, Pompiliu Teodor, Istoria României, editura Corint, București, 2007, pp. 316-321, pp. 324-328.

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However, there is another cultural direction of criticism present in the Romania intelligentsia of the 1880s and 1890s and that is the socialist one. Brought from Bessarabia by the Russian Solomon Katz (who would later be known under the naturalized name of Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea) in the late 1870s, the socialist criticism of the Romanian road to modernity has a complicated legacy. From the studies of Zigu Ornea on the life and the works of Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea234 we learn that the Russian-borne socialist belonged rather to the reformist camp of the German social-democracy, which had at its ideologue the revisionist German social-democrat Eduard Bernstein235. The socialist reformists of the Erfurt Program of 1891236 divided the western Marxist thinking into two different opposing sides, which would decide the fate of the international worker’s movement at the onset of the twentieth century. The split was in regard to the means of bringing socialism to completion: the social-democrats of Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky’s party237 embraced the democratic parliamentary fight and believed that the state, through legal procedures, will achieve the socialist desiderata after generations of constant political social-democratic pressure embodied in the trade union’s potential to organize strikes and demand political change. The German late-nineteenth century reformism also implied that the revolutionary, anarchist and violent methods embraced by the Russian socialist movement was itself an error, since it became a known fact that by the turn of the centuries, after 30 years of industrialization in Germany, the proletariat was doing financially better, enjoying political rights and economic benefits that had been impossible to even dare think about one or two generations before. For Bernstein there was no imminent demise of capitalism and, contrary to the bleak predictions of Marx’s political economy, the capitalist system expanded to every social class, thereby opening new vistas for the entrepreneurial skills of the middleman, the small bourgeois, as well as filling the coffers of the state with enough money as to redistribute it to large categories of people in social security schemes directed by the state. Naturally, Eduard Bernstein emphasis on the state 234

Zigu Ornea, Viața lui Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea, editura Cartea Românească, București, 1982. Zigu Ornea, Opera lui Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea, editura Cartea Românească, București, 1983, pp. 329380. 236 Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism, The New Press, New York, 1996. 237 Leszek Kołakowski, Principalele curente ale marxismului, vol. II “Vârsta de aur”, editura Curtea Veche, București, 2010, pp. 40-63, pp. 92-106. 235

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and on the power of the economy to redistribute the public wealth so as to alleviate the social grievances of the masses had been linked from the start to the German example. Germany was, by 1900s, one of the most industrialized countries in the world, an extraordinary accomplishment reached in about a quarter of a century, although, judging retrospectively, it tragically lacked the democratic public spirit of the Anglo-Saxon states238. In the particular case of the “young” Romanian kingdom, the chances for a socialist or socialdemocratic movement to impose itself in the political clashes of the age had been from the very moment null. The members of Junimea assumed ironically and then critically that Constantin Dobrogeanu Gherea’s social-democratic set of ideas was yet another proof of imported ideas, this time, described metaphorically, as an “exotic plant”. The real reason behind the complete failure of socialism in Romania before the First World War was the almost whole absence of the industrial infrastructure. As far as the 1930s, the underdeveloped industrial branches of the economy led to a similar under-representation of the working class. There was no real social need for a strong social-democratic or socialist party in Romania. The period of fast industrialization of the economy (and, hence, the improvement of the general standard of living) for the bulk of the society is the sole product of the communist period, which, as we now know, reshaped and radically altered the whole social hierarchy in Romania. However, Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea is important in our demonstration not as a forerunner of the Stalinist-styled Romanian communism, which he was certainly not, but rather as providing us with a genuine social-democratic analysis of the Romanian socio-political circumstances after half a century of fast westernization. Discredited and gaining no popularity in the academic world at the time, Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea will have his own posterity239. Paradoxically, in his activity as a leftist journalist at the end of the nineteenth century, Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea confirms the diagnosis expressed by Titu Maiorescu in his harsh criticism of 1868, În contra direcției de azi în cultura română. The liberal-bourgeois 238

Wolfgang Mommsen, Imperial Germany 1867–1918: Politics, Culture, and Society in an Authoritarian State, Bloomsbury USA, 1995. 239 Cristian Preda, Staulul și sirena. Dilemele unui marxist român, editura Nemira, București, 2002.

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institutions and the Western-inspired constitution of 1866 are exterior forms that were designed to brood a capitalistic liberal society. Nonetheless, adding substance to the whole argument, Dobrogeanu-Gherea emphasizes in his sociological studies the capitalist impetus triggered by the continuous dependency of the Romanian market on the flow of commodities and commercial exchanges of the Western European states after 1774 (the treaty of KuciukKainardji) and then 1829 (Treaty of Adrianople). Hence, the prospect of importing Western civilizational ideas was predetermined in the new capitalistic order. The foundation of the national state under the benevolent Western eyes had been another way of settling the capitalist economic activity in the region against the former domination of the Ottoman Empire or the even more menacing rise of the megalithic autocracy, the Tsarist Empire240. Moreover, the actual liberal bourgeois forms borrowed and naturalized in the Romanian kingdom in half a century were in deep contrast to the economic relations of production, argued Dobrogeanu-Gherea241. The Romanian economy was mainly depended on agricultural production, but the upper classes, the rich landowners who owned most of the arable land, did not set the peasant really free by the Agrarian Reform of 1864, that is, in a productive way. The peasant used to be tied to the piece of land on which he was working for the boyar. The feudal relation that was initiated thereby lasted for centuries prior to the reform of 1864. Now, instead of paying “taxes” or providing natural products to the landlord himself, the peasant had been turned into a tax-payer to the state. As a positive side effect, the budget of the Romanian state had tremendously to gain by the Agrarian Reform of 1864. In the process, the peasant would get his own piece of land and be transformed into an owner through the fiat of the state. It is noteworthy to remind at this point that the land was supplanted by the state (the traditional class of landowners kept their lands safe from the danger of expropriation) and that the peasant had to buy back with interest from the same state the land his family had been living on. The whole process would take decades to be successfully accomplished. In the meantime, the average size of the land ascribed to more than half of the peasant family (under 2 ha) was insufficient for the peasant to secure his daily living in an one year period and, 240

Keith Hitchins, Românii, 1774-1866, ediția a III-a, editura Humanitas, București, 2013, pp. 178-246. Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea, Neoiobăgia: studiu economico-sociologic al problemei noastre agrare, editura Nemira, București, 1998. 241

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moreover, it was completely ludicrous to assume that the peasant would get rich or acquire enough capital to do so by reinvestment giving his meagre cash reserves. Selling the propriety to anyone except other peasants or the commune was prohibited by law for the period of thirty years since the time of purchase. For Dobrogeanu-Gherea the capitalist relations have penetrated the rural life to such an extent that the peasant, unable to extract enough resources from his land to survive biologically (after all, the demographic boom of 1860-1914, which led to the doubling of the Romanian population, implied the existence of numerous peasant family members to feed242), had to work on the landowners’ large estates. Selling their labor time and being paid either in money or in goods were the only ways to physically get through. Capitalism developed in the landowners’ interest, the same way the British enclosure system had been changing the rural landscape in the eighteen century England. However, parallel to the capitalistic hiring of the peasantry by the agrarian rich proprietors, the Romanian peasant was also an owner, albeit a small one. At the same time, the common land was protected by the rights of the commons so that the landowner could not appropriate to himself all the land, which fell in the hands of the state in the course of the nineteenth century. This anomaly of feudal and capitalistic institutions functioning simultaneously was, according to Dobrogeanu-Gherea, a drawback in the modernization process of Romania since it inhibited the development of a national capitalistic class. The market was flooded with Western European manufactured goods after 1866 to which even the peasantry could have access to, although limited by its low purchasing power. Correspondingly, the local industries, having not been protected by state tariffs243, were exposed to foreign competition that spelled trouble for the budding entrepreneurial adventurers. At the same time, the rich landowners had little incentive to improve the agricultural techniques on the estates. New technology was not bought to cover all the estates’ productivity needs. Practically, the Romanian boyars did not have a capitalistic mindset from the very start. There was seldom any significant amount of capital to re-invest in the large tenure. Moreover, if the big landowners had indeed decided – which was only 242

Bogdan Murgescu, România și Europa, editura Polirom, Iași, 2010, pp. 103-205, with emphasis on the section with the conclusions. 243 For the policy of high tarriffs to protect the domestic market during times of industrial growth, see Paul Bairoch, Economics and World History, The University of Chicago Press, 1993, pp. 16-29, pp. 44-55.

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randomly the case – to turn into modern capitalistic businessmen, the peasant population, having been given property and, form a juridical perspective, enjoying liberal political rights, could refuse to work the bourgeois landowner’s fields (which was not the case, nonetheless, given the small allotments the peasantry held).

“Again, the question is whether large agricultural surpluses hastened the expansion of cities or whether sophisticated commercial farming was stimulated by urban demand, financed by merchant capital, and managed for profit-minded landlords by literate bailiffs or farmers. Both forces, we feel, contributed to growth.”244

Neither force was significantly present around 1850s in the two Principalities. The aristocratic Romanian boyars really only managed to build a late nineteenth century type of rentier capitalism. This was only a part of Costantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea’s Marxist analysis of the Romanian case. The other half is dedicated to the institutional scaffolding that occurred after 1866 in the small kingdom of Romania. The political elite, dominated at the top by the rich group of boyars in control of the largest estates, had to recruit a new class of bureaucrats for the young state. The human capital was ill-educated and originated from the weakly inhabited and underdeveloped cities of the two historical provinces. Since the government was composed of a majority of native Romanians, it could not attract the foreign minorities which were the capitalistic backbone of the urban life in Moldavia and, in a less degree, in Wallachia. Jews, Turks, Armenians, Russians, even Bulgarians and Italians used to represent strong, if not majoritarian, urban communities in the post-1866 Kingdom of Romania. These people had no political rights and could not take part in the handling of the state bureaucracy. The discriminatory policy had been part of the national state agenda since its very foundation. The state-directed policy of focusing on the ethic strata had legitimized the nation-state but went against the prospects of a republic of citizens in the Western legalist understanding. In the Old Kingdom citizenship was

244

Paul Hohenberg, Lynn Lees, The Making of Urban Europe, 1000-1994, Harvard University Press, 1996, p. 72.

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confined rather to the birth privilege than by a strong social compact in the modern understanding. As we have already referred to in previous sections, the problem of Neam and Popor as essentialist ethnic concepts had been realistically dealt with by Victor Neumann245. The ethnic Romanians living in the underdeveloped urban conglomerates of the Kingdom of Romania came from quasi-literate classes. They did not possess any significant capital. In most cases, they were financially dependent on the age-old feudal ties of the corporation of craftsmen. The fraternity of the guilds might have been strong, but under the menacing inflow of Western manufactured goods, the social utility of the guild was step by step losing its ground and its purpose. The public political openness to foreign markets after 1866 and especially importing manufactured commodities from Central Europe in return for the unbalanced export of cereals and raw materials had direct implications for the Romanian urban guilds, irrespective of their weakness or whether they dealt in money or were still bartering. They inevitably diminished as a social constituted corporation, lost their clients and disappeared in the face of exterior competitors who outmatched the local craftsman’s abilities and skill. The quality of the imported manufactured good was thus outpacing the guildsmen’s final manufactured product. For Dobrogeanu-Gherea the urban Romanians inhabitants looked for to the new founded state as a source of loosening up the tight economic noose around its neck: hence, an important contingent of urban dwellers has joined the ranks of the state bureaucracy. The state was now the sole benefactor of the Romanian middleclass: holding an office made one a socially respected clerk. The financial benefits were low, but the security of a job for life in the public administration was also priceless. This mentality perpetuated in the course of two or three generations before 1914 and led to the creation of a socially erratic order. On the one hand there were the rich landowners, unwilling to apply capitalistic schemes on their estates, who represented the political elites, on the other hand the state was controlled by a class of bureaucrats who were in the service of the rich politicians, irrespective of the change of government between the two historical parties, the Conservative Party (after 1880) and the Liberal Party (after 1875). The new state managerial class will constitute the only Romanian 245

Victor Neumann, Neam, popor sau națiune?, ediția a II-a, editura Curtea Veche, București, 2005, p. 134 and also Victor Neumann, Armin Heinen (editori), Istoria României prin concepte, editura Polirom, Iași, 2010, pp. 379-401.

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bourgeoisie, which, naturally, could not bring forward the necessary economic changes that would turn Romania into a modern society. The level of corruption in the public affairs of the state went even beyond the power of the Romanian Parliament (and the rich landowners as well) to properly control it. Sometimes, as testimonies from the period show, the boyars themselves participated in the corrupt mishandling of the state bureaucracy to their own personal benefit, especially during election time (there was no universal suffrage prior to 1918, however) or when state contracts for private dealers were being signed. Thus, even in the age we are concerned, there were voices, from Junimea or the social-democratic side, which cried for the dismantling and reforming the class of “budget-eating” officials, arguing that this “parasitic” reality was responsible for many errors in the state administration and, moreover, for filling the city-life with “political discourses” that were not the economic backbone of a real bourgeoisie. Most critical statements had been directed against the fake, yet real bourgeoisie of public servants in the country. The final picture of the social design to which the Romanian society looked forward to between 1857(1866) and 1914 could be described as follows: at the upper level, the civilizing select landed nobility of the boyars, educated in the republican France or in the conservative Germany/Austro-Hungary of the mid-nineteenth century, set to increase the commercial exchange on the trade routes to continental Europe, hopefully never having to radically change the relations of production on their estates. Without ever questioning the road to modernity of the Romanian nation-state, which was politically moderately liberal and economically capitalistic yet agrarian, the reformists would modernize from above the Romanian society irrespective of its opinion or willingness to participate in the new social compact enunciated by the Constitution of 1866. The foundation of the state of Romania was laid without the expressed consultation of at least 80% of the people, that is, the peasantry. Mutatis mutandis, as Daniel Barbu will demonstrate in Republica absentă246 for the post-communist society of post-1989, the political elites have also entitled themselves arbitrarily as the sole voice of the nation. Actually, the citizenship had never been a political matter to address; it was the national sovereignty of the state that was constantly looked for and cared after. Hence, the public 246

Daniel Barbu, Republica absentă, editura Nemira, București, 2004, pp. 17-43.

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culture would be legitimized first and foremost by the nation, which had been from the very start a concept monopolized by the local political elites. Culturally, the generation of modernizers, despite their Romantic ideals and western culture, were little attuned to the culture of the peasantry, although the glorification of the rich oral tradition present in the folkloric mindset had been a patriotic clamoring in parliamentary speeches or in journalistic polemics. The ranks, stuffed with administrative personnel, had another economic status and used to mimic the European manners and culture of the boyars. They were engaging into feeble displays of conspicuous consumption247. The function they played for the entire social hierarchy was tied to turning into reality the public policies dictated to them by the political elite. Actually, the state bureaucracy had been accustomed to siding with any government in power that, by the last decades of the nineteenth century, the state apparatus gained a life of its own, organized socially differently than the few large landowners. Lost in internal battles of prestige and personal envies, the boyars soon began slowly but irretrievably to strengthen the public administration. The State was the vehicle of modernization and, implicitly, the bureaucracy had the real advantage of controlling de facto the state administration. While the governments were shifting rapidly in a matter of years, the bourgeoisie of functionaries tried to hold on to its position and consolidate it forever. The agent of modernization, found exclusively within the administrative elite, became a distinct social body, set to weaken the influence and economic power of the class of boyars. The notion of modern citizenship (and the citizenry itself) has been formed during the period 1866-1914 by the state officials, from the rank and file to the higher echelons. Having being plagued by corruption in the political turmoil of the large landowners and having no financial independence other than the one guaranteed by the state as ordinary employees, the class of state bureaucrats, probably a Romanian replica of the German and Austro-Hungarian public administrations at the time, acquired a social status of its own as a state bourgeoisie. Titu Maiorescu’s harsh indictment of the new class is a testimony to its existence, but whereas the social-democratic stance takes notice of the presence of late 247

Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions, Penguin Classics edition, 1994.

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feudal economic relations within the society, the classical liberal position (perhaps conservative) appeals to the importance of professionalism and ethics in the matter of state administration. Apparently, the European surface of the society, as has been observed at the time by travelers and also by the elites themselves, was derived from the Romanian undersized urban classes, which, though not exclusively, were depending one way or another on the material support of the state. In the third instance, the peasantry had been the backbone of the Romanian state and society, but the majority of the population living in rural areas was at the time, as it is extensively documented248, both illiterate and apolitical. Their economic dependence on the capitalistic relations managed by the landed aristocracy, even after the Agrarian Reform of 1864, was impervious to deep social reforms. Consequently, the nation was an often-used political concept, but the citizens of the state were, in their vast number, set apart from the affairs of the modernizing state. Politics was at best the matter of the class of functionaries and of the rich boyars. The civilization was lagging behind the one in Central and Western Europe due to the vivid feudal character of the social order. The large owners of agricultural land had invested only small amounts into the fixed capital required to improve the agricultural output249. The boyars were culturally Europeanized and, to a certain extent, the same might be conceded to the public administration, but the bulk of the citizens were trapped into a folkloric traditional culture of its own without suffering the interference of the genuine civilizational structures, but of a shallow replica of it. However, the divide between Western forms and local realities, which for the Junimea is expressed by the phrase “forms without substance”, translates into the break between the “legal Romania” and the “real Romania” for Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea. The legal Romania is issuing new laws and implementing modern institutions at a fast speed. The real Romania, in the hands of the administration with the tacit consent of the landowners, the state oligarchy, does not apply the law at all. The legalistic excesses are a cover-up for the poor administration of the state. The civilization is an outward appearance for the inner culture,

248 249

Keith Hitchins, Românii, 1774-1866, ediția a III-a, editura Humanitas, București, 2013, pp. 78-145. Apostol Stan, Putere politică și democrație în România: 1859-1918, editura Albatros, București, 1995.

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which is traditional250, the only quantifiable relevant peasantry in Central Europe around the 1900s. Almost identical, but from opposite standings of the political spectrum, the liberal conservative and the social-democratic criticism of the Romanian modernization process seems to coincide and describe the same social and cultural unfolding reality. To sum up, the modernization process had been all along before the historical period of the Great Romania in the aftermath of the First World War a non-democratic state (which was not really different then from many other countries251), controlled by a Western-educated elite of landowners. Together with all the public servants, they added up to a minority of the society. Thus, the Romanian kingdom was an agrarian oligarchy backed up by a moderately liberal bourgeois constitution and public culture. The peasantry, instead of organically disintegrating, was left to work the lands of the boyars and, thus, the peasants continued to live in poverty and to suffer from the interference of skin-deep Western values in the guise of corrupt dysfunctional modern institutions of local extraction. However, the lack of capitalistic development in the industry and the increased degree of state corruption sealed Romania, from a strictly comparative methodological viewpoint, as a hybrid between Western Europe and Tsarist Russia. If the political Western culture had not been introduced by the elites in the aftermath of the 1848 Revolution, the Kingdom of Romania would have been an authoritarian state on the model of the Russian Empire. The ethnic diversity in the urban area was the same as in the Kingdom of Romania, not to mention the social divisions (the same large rural population), the corrupt practices in the state bureaucracy, the same economic backwardness (lack of any significant industrial activity, coupled with a heavy dependence on pre-modern techniques and no political representativeness of the peasantry) and even the same blankness 250

“Greșeala conservatorilor, ca și a democraților, este că s-au oprit în drum în cercetarea lor și, constatând un fapt social, o cauză socială, n-au căutat să urmeze mai departe cercetarea; constatând că înseși clasele dominante și oligarhia politicianistă împiedică statornicirea unor relații legale, normale la sate și perpetuează anarhismul administrativ, nu și-au pus întrebarea: de unde provine acest fapt social anormal? Cum se poate ca tocmai organele care fac legi — și prin urmare au nevoie de domnia legilor — să împiedice executarea lor?” from Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea, Neoiobăgia: studiu economico-sociologic al problemei noastre agrare, editura Nemira, București, 1998, chapter 6, “Problema ilegalismului și rezultatele morale, culturale, juridice și politice ale neoiobăgiei”. 251

New Zealand became the first nation in the world to achieve universal suffrage in 1893, for both men and women. Universal male suffrage had been achieved in Switzerland (1848), Australia (1857-1858), Greece (1864), the German Empire since 1871 and France by the Constitutional Law of 1875, the United States in 1870.

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in regard to a common political culture focused on a modern understanding of the citizen and citizenship. The only eye bothering difference was that the political elite had decided for a liberal Western state where the representative of the nation was the civilized boyar. What did Alexandru Duțu think about the clash between the civilization of the West, expressed by the generation of 1848 and even the subsequent ones, and the traditional culture? How did he judge the process of modernity? What was the role he ascribed to the state? What is the real civilizational mindset of the Eastern European inhabitant before the nineteenth century? How to tackle the process of modernization efficiently, by preserving what is organically borne and acquiring the mental habits of the modern Europe? How could the elites supplement novel ideas into the administrative body? All these queries will get their answers in the next chapter.

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Chapter 4 – Scriptural and Oral Mindsets A multiple Europe in transition To Alexandru Duțu, the idea of Europe is inscribed in the realm of transitions, all of them being ultimately mentality changes. The transient character of various European regions is treated by Alexandru Duțu as a means of answering some questions pertaining to the cultural specificity of the European mindset, the coherence or the lack of a common identity in Europe with the passing of centuries, the relationship between the private and the public life, the persistency of similar political models.252 The place occupied by Romania in the European context is depicted by Alexandru Duțu as a quest for the local intelligentsia to look for the specific traits of the Romanian culture, the leading influence of the Orthodox religion, the social balance between the state and the Church in the everyday life of the community. Simultaneously, another challenge posed by Europe to its many different cultures has been acknowledged by Alexandru Duțu as a way through which to “contemplate Europe from the south-east and to judge the south-east looking at it from Western Europe.”253 Having decided to address the issue of the European mindset as a set of periods that form the backbone of the European consciousness, Alexandru Duțu divides the development of the European common framework of reference into five different ages. The first is what Alexandru Duțu called in his last book Respublica christiana, which began in the Dark Ages and lasted until the fifteenth century. The Christian republic or the Christendom at large is centered within or around the Mediterranean basin254 and had built itself into a bulwark of Christianity (as a political and economic survival scheme) against the rapidly spreading Islam255. From Charles the Great’s attempt to build a Christian Roman Empire to the impact of the Roman and Byzantine Churches on the European civilization, Europe has been the

252

Alexandru Duțu, Idee de Europa și evoluția conștiinței europene, All Educational, București, 1999, p. 25. Ibidem. 254 Fernand Braudel, Memory and the Mediterranean, New York: Vintage, 2001. 255 Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades, three volumes, Cambridge University Press, 1951, 1952, 1954. 253

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battleground of cultures, of traditions256 that had been shaped by the common ancestry of the Christian faith257. It was only when “the contradiction between the weight of a rural continent and the dream of renovation by the intellectuals” that a new age opened up for the European civilization. The educated medieval scholars did not only freshen up the cultural horizons of the medieval man, but have also asked for a “reevaluation of the relation between the political power and the subjects.”258 This has brought the age of European humanism to the fore. Now the Respublica letteraria was accomplishing the task of instilling an intellectual accent into the European consciousness. The period had lasted almost to the onset of the eighteenth century and is depicted generally by Alexandru Duțu as a mixture of renaissance zeal and Christian theological thinking. The European “unity”, as Alexandru Duțu indicates, has been set by the network of university centers, organized around monasteries where Latin was the lingua franca. As in the Dark Ages, but markedly more visible, Islam played the main role in triggering the potential for a European identity. Again, as in the first period, it is the mentality of the elites that spreads downwards to other social categories, which determines the European common denominator. Another Europe of the general mindset will have its point of origin in the “baroque” period, centered mostly on the royal courts of the absolute monarchs in Western and Central Europe. The contact with other non-European civilizations, especially in the representation of the noble savage (bon sauvage259), will furnish a new sense of the superiority and power of the European civilization in the affairs of the New World260. The world of enlightened monarchs, who employ the amending power of reason to their side, works against the fixity of the Ottoman rule 261. The critical spirit acquires its own radiating power and the “satirical literature” will use the foreign traveler as the critical lens of the social order.

256

Peter Partner, God of Battles: Holy War of Christianity and Islam, Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1997. 257 See also the introduction by Alexandru Duț+ u to Ernst Robert Curtius, Literatura europeană și evul mediu latin, editura Univers, București, 1970, pp. V-XXIII. 258 Alexandru Duțu, Idee de Europa și evoluția conștiinței europene, All Educational, București, 1999, p. 36 259 Cătălin Avramescu, Filozoful crud, editura Humanitas, București, 2003, pp. 100-151. 260 Paul Hazard, Criza conștiinței europene, editura Humanitas, București, 2007, pp. 11-37. 261 Alexandru Duțu, Idee de Europa și evoluția conștiinței europene, All Educational, București, 1999, p. 35.

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“Montesquieu’s Persian Letters will have a truly European echo, not only due to the frequent reediting, but also through imitation, and together with the writings of Mandeville and Swift will naturalize the idea that the critical spirit is the ally of freedom (…) and political freedom is a European conquest.”262 It is actually in this respect that the introduction of the idea of the “social body” is accomplished. To Alexandru Duțu, instead of the “balance of powers”, one has the possibility of a social compact with its own clearly-set rules. Hence, on the grounds of the social body, the Enlightened Europe begins a new age. The cosmopolitan noblemen, attuned to the different social realities of the Old and the New World, open to other cultures and distrusting the grip of traditions in late-feudal Europe, is the new model of the French salons, in a time where France was the intellectual arbiter of the whole “civilized” Europe and French the language of the transcontinental European elites. The concepts of the “citizen of the world” had entered the vocabulary of the higher orders. “The French language becomes the language of the diplomats and the highly-educated people begin to realize that they live on a continent which is gifted with a common civilization.”263 The self-awareness of Europe as the leading economic and cultural lighthouse of the world is preeminent during the eighteenth century. What takes place in the next age is the appearance of the Europe of the revolutionaries and of the nineteenth century nations, which, to Alexandru Duțu, corresponds to the “unification impulse”. It is a Europe which “is propelled by the imperial dream, which implants European groups on other continents or which dreams the unity of the continent under a single hegemony, as in Napoleon’s

262 263

Ibidem, p. 36. Ibidem, p. 37.

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plans, who, nevertheless, gives Europe a well-thought civil code, the single metric system for weights and measures”.264 The consciousness of a single European civilization, based on sovereign states, national cultures, a common history, similar political principles, a common market as the leading force in the worldwide exchange of goods, even the presence of European federalist conceptions transformed the mindset of European elites during the age. It was only with the advent of the twentieth century and in the aftermath of the First World War that the Europe of uniformity and diversity “enters the intellectual debate”. “The war had triggered the hate towards the enemy, the refusal of the parliamentary democracy which could not prevent the catastrophe, the dismissal of the rule of law from the part of the nationalists who were of the opinion that impersonal laws were blocking the activity of their leader, the refusal to separate the public from the private spheres and, implicitly, the ability of the market to correctly redistribute goods was denied. The radical nationalism allied with the revolutionary socialism in its conviction that violence was justified in the political life – hence, the belief that politics is a never ending war”265. Nonetheless, what followed after 1945 had led to the divide between an already modern industrialized Western Europe and the Eastern lands, which were still experiencing the effects of their own troubled history in regard to the modernization process that was initiated in the nineteenth century. As for the final collapse of the Eastern Block around the end of the twentieth century, it did not only symbolize the bankruptcy of an economic order which could not only compensate for the rhythm of development in the most economically-active capitalist societies, but was outside the world market as well. It also meant that “the fast modernization of the state structures from the last century [the nineteenth century] and the chaotic fast-moving modernization of the economic structures by the communist regimes had broken the link between the citizen and the regime in power and,

264 265

Ibidem. Ibidem, p. 38.

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in the last years, the link between the citizen and the community. which haunts the former communist states expresses the limit of an unnatural process of constructing the public life.”266 For Alexandru Duțu, the Western-Eastern divide does not really hold true. The geographical division does not explain the status quo in the aftermath of the Cold War. There are two “political existences”: “on the one hand, a permissive society, which allows for the individual initiative and asks for responsibility; on the other hand, there is a society of constraint that asks the citizen to participate in the , of , of the and demands their compliance.”267 Apparently, from a cultural point of view, there is a “tension” between the “personal aspirations” and “the collective exigencies” in societies where the “tradition of thinking” is lavishly nuanced and has a profundity of its own, more so “in the cultures influenced by the Orthodox Church”. However, Eastern Europe has its own distinctive cultural enclaves, out of which south-eastern Europe is one among others. To Alexandru Duțu, the multiple identities of the region have been reaffirmed in the first decades of the nineteenth century. It had been the revolutionary ideas of national emancipation that furnished the first acknowledgment that the area was not only part of the “Greek world” or of the “Ottoman Empire”. “The gradual discovery of the Balkans and the force of stereotypes and mental frames disclose the dilatory rhythm in which the peoples with an intense spiritual life have caught the attention of foreign researchers. In the eighteenth century, an English traveler which had passed through Bulgaria and Wallachia expressed his gratitude to God that he reached the Habsburg border and was out of the heathen lands. From the eighteen century onwards there is the frequent discussion about a diverse world that does not possess the uniformity suggested by travelers who travelled from the court of a pasha to the court of another. The national states which came to existence have borne the idea that the frontiers of the 266 267

Ibidem, p. 52. Ibidem.

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continent are not where the Western army and administration had gone to. The Napoleonic wars have been a decisive impetus towards reconsidering the European map: if the age of Enlightenment had expounded the of a world that had realized its own selfconsciousness - the Western world -, the age of Romanticism, which had sided with the revolutionary spirit, had brought to full view the ignored peoples. By perceiving cultural values, Western scientists and politicians have started to be interested in delimitating a region which, from a political perspective, had seemed uniform. Culture had given deepness and new shades to the picture, hastily drawn by the political will.”268 According to Alexandru Duțu, the whole region witnessed a “vigorous diversity”, to the point where it lost its own “proclaimed” individuality. The troublesome political changes in the twentieth century have contributed to the restructuring of the entire area. If the Balkans have indeed showed signs of a “clear unity” in the medieval period (which, from Alexandru Duțu’s demonstration, had been perpetuated until the 1800s), the modern period indicates rather a “centrifugal tendency”. In the nineteenth century, the Romanian scholars and young intellectuals are inspired by “the cultural centers of Europe and these are not in the Balkans: as it had happened all throughout the European civilization, the strain is decided by the center of intense intellectual activity. As in the times of the Renaissance, the intellectuals come from the south-east and head towards the great universities, libraries and museums. We are dealing with a , which moves the minds from the Balkans to Central and Western Europe.”269 The cultural and political challenge that, in the pre-nineteenth century Romanian lands for example, had been for centuries Istanbul, is after 1800 replaced by other great urban centers, such as Vienna, Munich and Berlin or Paris.

268 269

Ibidem, p. 55. Ibidem, p. 56.

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“As the seventeenth century people felt themselves to be closer to Jerusalem or Alep, the same did those in the nineteenth century with Paris and Berlin.”270 However, the large part of the society continued to live under the primacy of tradition, which had its own mindset about life and human beings. “Traditionalism groups us with and makes us give more credit to the said and visualized thing that to the written one: the orality has not only supported the spread of a folklore which seems to be a business card of the nation, but has also contributed to the creation of the , within which the and the nuances have a decisive function. The orality, then, favors the perpetuation of the models of humanity which maintain the ethical edifice, but burdens the progress of pluralism: it simultaneously perpetuates the Cosmo-centrism which draws near the Balkans to the East.”271 Alexandru Duțu stresses at this point the relevance of the modernization process in Romania, which, according to him, had been non-linear during its evolution. “Finally, the political initiatives and the clogged economies have left their mark on an area where a resolute skepticism persists in regard to the progress towards welfare (…).”272 To Alexandru Duțu there have been two parallel modernization processes: the first had imposed the dominance of imitation and the prevalence of social contraptions in order to prosper and gain social and financial stability and the second “had destroyed the basic human connections”273. The former could be easily associated to the period 1866-1938, while the latter corresponds to the communist collectivist experiment. The theory of “forms without content” is retrospectively organically introduced by Alexandru Duțu in the development of the Romanian society.

270

Ibidem. Ibidem, p. 57. 272 Ibidem. 273 Ibidem. 271

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“Actually, we could identify in the conflict between tradition and innovation a modern constant of the European south-east. While the traditionalists willing to resurrect Byzantium or to relive the glory of an age created by the nationalist historiography do not hesitate to make responsible for the modern confusion the partisans of fast Westernization of the European south-east, the modernizers find only obscurantism and a haven in the past in the traditionalists’ worldview.”274 However, destabilizing one of the two tendencies would mean to interfere with the movement of the whole society in the labors of modernization. To Alexandru Duțu the relevance of the Orthodox cultural legacy is that, during centuries of elaborate intellectual design between the religious mindset and the folkloric residues, a new mental framework was built. Apparently, says Alexandru Duțu “for the majority of the Western intellectuals, the Balkans gain an character only when they adopt Western ideas and forms: the rest seems to remain into a benumbed world stuck in an obsolete mindset. The progress of secularism has diminished the sensibility for the manifestations of the sacred, to which Orthodoxy remained connected.”275 The deep marks of the Orthodox influence are present all throughout the Eastern Europe: a common mindset is a trademark of the region before the 1800s. The same social and political turmoil was experienced by most countries nearby in building the national-states and the “integration” into the civilized Western Europe. Romania belongs culturally to the Orthodox Weltanschauung, but the cultural models embraced by the elite are a mixture of Western patterns and Central European models. However, as we approach the present, “the religious distinction is abusive, when political matters are being discussed. The opposition nowadays is not (with the exception of some clerical circles) between the

274 275

Ibidem, p. 58. Ibidem.

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Catholic and the Orthodox worlds. The contemporary world is secularized (…). An Orthodox Europe, envisaged through the political lens, does not exist: there is a Byzantine-European tradition which left its mark on a country which truly has acquired imperial dimensions, similar to Byzantium – Russia.”276 Romania, on the other hand, does not belong to the political confines set up by “scholars, historians and other diplomats”277: to Alexandru Duțu, Romania is part of a civilizational tradition. At the same time, although generally the East symbolically possesses a “substantial image of man”, it has never dealt thoroughly with its practical political organization, which to Alexandru Duțu refers to matters of social cohesion and the values it implies, during its history. “The whole debate that since Machiavelli’s time henceforth had been a preoccupation in the Western world has no counterpoise in the East.”278Alexandru Duțu is well aware of the risks and possible consequences of politically embracing “the ideas and the mentalities that form the structures of everyday living”, since this would not only “drift us away from the West, but it would also deny the democratic option in organizing the social and political life”. 279 Alexandru Duțu reemphasizes the cultural patterns and the importance of the exchange in terms of values and mentalities as the reason for the regional particularities in Europe. “The Europe of regions is not determined by geographical circumstances, by political borderlines, by our deep convictions: the regions have persistent and flexible characteristic which furnish, however, the unity and the diversity of the continent. The regions could form, in a free Europe, along common interests and affinities. But they all freeze under the icy wind gust of stereotypes.”280 It is exactly the contradictory mirror images of large-scale stereotypes that threaten the identity of the cultural mindset. Whether the elites themselves embrace either the modernizing 276

Ibidem, p. 62. Ibidem. 278 Ibidem. 279 Idem. 280 Ibidem, p. 63. 277

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stereotypes (namely the backward “traditional” social values present in the deep fabric of society) or, on the contrary, the traditionalists dogmatic approach (that it is precisely tradition which confers the genuine character of a nation), unrealistic stereotypes show up and distort both the daily praxis and the reasoning behind it. “The continental regions can acquire exclusivist characteristics, when the stereotypes accumulate and they turn into a common commodity. It is the case with , with , with , of the set of attributes which makes us add a full share of traits to the image of the Italian, the French, the Bulgarian or the Danish, when we encounter it for the first time.”281 The dialectics of stereotypes is for Alexandru Duțu distorted by domestic or foreign agents of propaganda (from the state representatives to mass media) to such an extent that the question of self-identity transforms itself into a matter of political ideology. “It is beyond doubt that the divergent interests of the incumbent politicians divide and set one against the other.” 282 The general picture painted by the Western mind is that of an economically-backward region, with a firm traditional mindset, little private initiative and plenty of religious superstition. The protestant ethic of Max Weber283 and the rationalization of daily affairs it brought with it have no correspondent to the East of the Elbe. The religious iconography has the century-long eastern European Orthodox trademark. “The Byzantine icon cannot be contemplated as a pure work of art, since its beauty leads to a prototype.”284 To Alexandru Duțu, it is an epistemological misgiving that the “Orthodox civilization is studied in non-south-eastern European universities as part of a course in Byzantinology, which gives the impression to the few interested that it is about a dead civilization.”285 These Western clichés have been imported by the Westerneducated local elite in the mid-nineteenth century and have initiated a period of fast radical reforms designed to wipe out the shortcomings, namely the whole oral and

281

Ibidem, p. 64. Ibidem. 283 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Oxford University Press, USA, 2010. 284 Ibidem, p. 71 285 Ibidem. 282

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scriptural religious and secular tradition that constituted the people’s mindset. The reaction had been proportionally exclusivist. “Romanians, having debated the political affairs within their principalities, have developed a traditional type of politics, but haven’t questioned the possibility of a public sphere, where the duty towards the State and the respect for the citizen is present. This offset would have serious consequence in the development of the south-eastern European world, which, at the time it dealt with the national-state design, was not consolidated by a tradition able to offer a set of answers to the great challenges in the tremendous effort of establishing the basic foundations of the society.”286 The xenophobic element within the various eastern European nationalisms, together with the strong anti-Semitic tendency (mostly, a religious-based anti-Semitism287), have been mixed into a toxic concoction where the political elites borrowed the Ottoman leadership, that was branded as part and parcel of the century-old “Oriental despotism” since the eighteenth century. Whether these stereotypes ring true or not, it is not a question to be asked. The real question is in regard to their validity and to the extent they have been embraced. In the nineteenth century, states Alexandru Duțu, “the Western intellectuals have approached the south-eastern European values, cropping what the local intellectuals have highlighted: the folklore and the popular literature.”288 However, this had been achieved at the expense of the Byzantine tradition. “The post-Byzantium intellectuals have completely invented a folkloric tradition and have rejected the local . Hence, they have fueled new data into already widespread stereotypes.”289

286

Ibidem, p. 73. Léon Poliakov, The History of Anti-Semitism: From Voltaire to Wagner, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003 and The History of Anti-Semitism: Suicidal Europe. 1870-1933, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003; for the Romanian case, Andrei Oișteanu, Inventing the Jew. Antisemitic Stereotypes in Romanian and Other Central-East European Cultures, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln & London, 2009. 288 Alexandru Duțu, Idee de Europa și evoluția conștiinței europene, All Educational, București, 1999, p. 76. 289 Ibidem, p. 76. 287

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To demonstrate this point of view, Alexandru Duțu addresses what he calls the “four levels” on which these stereotypes have been configured during the nineteenth century290. “At the level of communication, one can notice the weakening of the ties with the neighboring countries and the intensification of appropriating concepts and themes from the French and German cultures, which channel the disappearance of the interest in the Byzantine civilization. At the educational level, the textbooks propagate the national ideal and speak about the illustrious origin of the Roman descendence, which does not continue with the second Rome, recovered when the Phanariots are being denigrated: in the first place, Stephen the Great and Michael the Brave show up, followed by the rulers who fought for the , while from among the eminent Byzantine leaders there are only two names mentioned: the emperors Justinian and Constantine the Great. At the political level, the discussion is initiated between those who favor the import from foreign countries and those who defend a continuity which is not envisaged in its entirety, especially since there is a general consensus that the of the Romanian people had begun after 1848. This selective memory which pretends that the Romanians had an extra muros mission by blocking the barbarian invasions (…) disentangles the much-debated continuity, since it emphasized the battlehistory and forgets about the forms of mental reproduction that make up the tradition. At the cultural level, folklorism converged with the Francophile mindset, in regard to which it became an alter ego and had downsized or even dismissed the written culture of the royal courts and monasteries.”291 The communicative, educational, political, cultural levels have gone awry, as far as the cultural heritage before the modernization process is concerned. The collection of stereotypes exposed by Alexandru Duțu is detrimental to the way in which the whole modernization scheme had been understood. The foundations of the nation-state, represented by the import of Western cultural models during the nineteenth century, are not configured on the tradition Alexandru 290

Alexandru Duțu, Political Models and National Identities in , editura Babel, București, 1998. 291 Ibidem, p. 77.

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Duțu hints to as being the genuine one. He attributes these circumstances to the way the Byzantine tradition had been historically assessed, that is, as belonging not to the European civilization, but to the Far East. “As long as the history of the European consciousness will not be depicted by a team of specialists from all the regions of Europe, it will never be fully comprehended.”292 Most of the attitudes of modern historians, especially Western European, to the cultural significance of the Byzantine stems from a religious skepticism that is attributable to the secularized mindset, whereas the Byzantine world, according to Alexandru Duțu, comprises essentially of a religious mental framework, which is prevalent in all fields of public life. “We can state, at this moment, that is the result of a secular perception of a religious civilization.”293 The same procedure of conceptual decontextualizing takes place with the concept of Balkanism. The stereotype is summed up by Alexandru Duțu as follows: “Hospitality and patience are balanced by the art of wasting time, of gossiping and dissimulating the acceptance of a profitable opportunism. The Balkan-type is always on the side of the status quo, even when the authorities lack any authority. Then, the bursts of anger, which spring from uncontrollable emotions, are the cause of atrocities and crazy destructions. It seems evident that solidarities are borne more at the level of emotions rather than at the level of ideas.”294 This meaning of , based on the chaotic strife between ineffectual factions, had been the invention of the Western travelers and diplomats going through the region, since the elements described by the foreign eye, although realistic, do not constitute, as far as Alexandru Duțu is concerned, the definition of Balkanism. The negative set of attributes pertains to a backward largely feudal society which had not yet been properly exposed to the Western influence.

292

Ibidem, p. 79. Ibidem. 294 Ibidem, p. 80. 293

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The way the nation is employed has its roots in the same conceptual transfer from the enlightened West to the backward East. The essentialist assessment of the nation is critically scrutinized by Alexandru Duțu in his posthumous book, although, as we have demonstrated in the second chapter, the normative and the descriptive uses of the concept of nation are not clearly defined elsewhere295. “The thinking behind this project [the national one] had been reductionist and had eliminated the mysterious and imponderable trait from human existence, while the citizen had become more and more dependent on the State. (…) The radical control of the State296 had consolidated the vertical connections and had discarded the horizontal ones, in such a way that had appeared as a salutary solution against the social atomization.”297 The nature of the stereotype is a social artifact that cuts across historical realities and cultural traditions. “It is the case of the way in which terms such as , and even are used (…). The use of a false naming gives to those who have the capacity to intervene a sense of spiritual easiness (…) In order not to allow the mechanical thinking to swallow up the clear reasoning, we need to closely research the images that school textbooks impose on the minds of students and how a certain series of spiritual predispositions under the influence of the stereotype of the other are being built.” 298 The construction of cultural stereotypes is part of the nationalistic historiography inherited from the nineteenth century Romanticism: the intelligentsia and the authorities of the state go

295

More so in the books published before 1989, especially Coordonate ale culturii românești în secolul al XVIII-lea, editura pentru Literatură, București, 1968, Cărțile de înțelepciune în cultura română, editura Academiei Republicii Socialiste România, București, 1972, Cultura română în civilizația europeană modernă, editura Minerva, București, 1978 and Romanian Humanists and European Culture. A Contribution to Comparative and Cultural History, editura Academiei, București, 1977. 296 The Romanian word is “hiperetatizarea” and I had to paraphrase the concept. 297 Alexandru Duțu, Idee de Europa și evoluția conștiinței europene, All Educational, București, 1999, p. 81, but for an in-depth analysis of the matter cf. Alexandru Duțu, Political Models and National Identities in , editura Babel, București, 1998. 298 Ibidem, p. 82.

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hand in hand in the dissemination of widespread clichés, which hinder the already distorted organic tradition itself. This entails the weakness of the modernization process in Romania and even in the south-eastern Europe generally: the public institutions are enfeebled when they operate on the basis of modern concepts that are not organically embedded (no more than an exterior object hindering the life of the organism), the juridical and political dominance of an elite that does not substantiate its liberal modernizing political credentials. Alexandru Duțu’s overt explanation is a return to the local traditions: following centuries of political and military turmoil in which no stable politically-oriented community had been fostered, the Orthodox mentality had protected the individual from all the outside perils the region had been subject to. “The ability of the sacred to give birth to a degraded and decrepit world, to strengthen the human being in its effort towards plenitude and cheerfulness, to offer equilibrium to the man subjected to devastating experiences, which have their starting point in the basic wish to destroy, is that of giving meaning to the Orthodox south-eastern world.”299 What is really important for Alexandru Duțu is that in south-eastern Europe the link between the scriptural and oral mindset is uninterrupted, most books being meant as a source of public reading long into the eighteenth century. “In these circumstances, the rural orality is not under the attack of the written word, but it is influenced by the written account which is being used with the rules of the oral culture: first the communal reading of not too long excerpts and then meditating on the spoken word. Moreover, the literate individual continues to read the texts which are being listened to by many: thus, a new literature for everybody acquires its form.”300 All the texts receive a two-dimensional interpretation, in conformity to the spiritual education of the local culture. The first interpretation is like an interior circle, where we encounter “the ritual literature, the books of wisdom and the sacred history” followed by a larger exterior

299 300

Ibidem, p. 87. Ibidem, p. 116.

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circle, where moralizing tales, romanced historical literature and books related to the worldly behavior stand out as the most representative. “The two circles preserve a uniform vision about the world and this determinant element – id est of adhering to a set of principles – gives the whole culture a trait and builds a .” 301 In this common reference the scriptural records are designated as the rational reflection of a stable foundation. “Everywhere in the Europe, solidarities lean on the Christian norms and on the ideas borrowed from the ancient thinking. While in the West, the cultural levels are divided between the rural environment and the clerical/ courtly one, in the south-east orality prevails until recently and it maintains the which refers to anybody, without holding back the educated person from reading philosophy and search the fate of humankind.”302 There is this constant blending between the spoken language and the written records before the Romantic age of the nineteenth century. Alexandru Duțu’s hypotheses is that the “ collected by the Romantics in the course of the nineteenth century will be impregnated by the ideas originating from the courtly and the ecclesiastical rhetoric, but also from the books being read aloud.”303 The world-from-within is founded on the mixture between the oral and the scriptural mindset. However, the divide between the world-from-within and the-outside-world is the chasm that separates the spiritual legacy from the commands of “the body”.

Hence, the diminished place occupied by the political sphere in the local social customs inherited from the distant past. “The priority of the spiritual over the psychic and matter sets politics among the sciences of the contingent and, therefore, needs to be always considered after the moral dimension.”304 There is no reason to underestimate that in order to grasp the mental core of the Romanian culture, which has survived long after the process of modernization had been initiated in the 1820s, it is mandatory to see beneath the modern 301

Idem. Idem. 303 Ibidem, p. 117. 304 Ibidem, p. 125. 302

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institutions and scrutinize the culture of the people themselves. The legacy of the past should first be objectively perceived and not reduced to a series of empty concepts, such as the stereotypes that have marred the intellectual recollections of the past after 1866. Both the presence of vulgar nationalism and Western radical reformism are rejected as inorganic and scientifically unsound by Alexandru Duțu. His anti-utopian approach is defined by Karl Mannheim in the context of the conservative idea, as the German philosopher names it:

“It's important for the activist, conservative mode of experience to subdue this form of utopia also, and to harmonize the latent, vital energies present there with its own spirit. What needs to be controlled here is the concept of "inner freedom ", which constantly threatens to turn into anarchism (it had once before turned into a revolt against the church). Here also the conservative idea, embedded in reality, has a subduing influence on the utopia espoused by the inner enemies. According to the dominant theory of conservatism, "inner freedom”, in its undefined, worldly objective, must subordinate itself to the moral code which has already been defined. Instead of "inner freedom ", we have "objective freedom ", to which the former must adjust itself. Metaphysically this may be interpreted as a pre-stabilized harmony between internally subjectified and externally objectified freedom. That this current of the movement, which is characterized by introspective Pietistic attitudes, conforms to the above interpretation is to be explained only by its fatal helplessness in the face of worldly problems. On that account it yields the reins to the dominance of the realistic conservative group either by surrendering entirely or by retiring to some obscure corner”.305

Not even the theory of the social compact, which brought about the modern secular political culture of most Western countries, could be attributable from the beginning to the cultural legacy in the Romanian lands and, later on, to the sovereign state of Romania. The reason behind this is to be looked for in the local culture itself, which stood against the imported

305

Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, Routledge Classics in Sociology, 1998, pp. 214-215.

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institutions of Western Europe. The modernizing elites did not take into account this vital reality. “We do not even have the semblance of anything like : the compact is accepted in front of the divinity and not by the consensus of the popular will with the dominant classes. What we encounter here is the obligation to cement solidarities, through social protection, one would say today, and by getting to know the realities.” 306 However, the social compact, another missing piece in the puzzle of the Romanian modernization during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is in stark contrast to what Alexandru Duțu states about the way the local mindset depicts the society’s communitarian spirit307. There is no reason to get into further detail now (we will proceed for the following later on), but it is worthwhile mentioning for now that Alexandru Duțu’s standpoint on the matter is slightly non-secular and in favor of the community (Gemeinschaft), not the collectivity (Gesellschaft)308.

“(…) The idea of social harmony which Christianity places at the core of its teaching and which is the opposite of that destroys solidarities and encourages violent actions. The relations are multiple and subtle between Christian love and social harmony which, in the first place, eliminates the fear that the political power might engender. In other words, love does not spring from the soul of the citizenry, but also from the heart of those who have political power.”309

The passage resembles very much the basic idea underlying the following statement:

“We have on offer two contrasting systems of collective social order. One is based essentially on concord, on the fundamental harmony of wills, and is developed and 306

Ibidem, p. 128. By communitarian I mean the liberal view of the concept as expressed in Daniel Bell, East Meets West, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. 308 Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Civil Society, Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 15-93. 309 Alexandru Duțu, Idee de Europa și evoluția conștiinței europene, All Educational, București, 1999, p. 129. 307

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cultivated by religion and custom. The other is based on convention, on a convergence or pooling of rational desires; it is guaranteed and protected by political legislation, while its policies and their ratification are derived from public opinion.”310

Alexandru Duțu goes on to argue that if one would judge from the dialectical relation which derives from liberty and equality in modern times, the leftovers of Christianity in the modern world would treat the whole crux as pertaining solely to the individual consciousness. The same process takes place in the relation existing between the citizenry and the political power: it is the “personal consciousness” which decides the final outcome. Nevertheless, if we may be allowed to treat Alexandru Duțu’s theoretical assumptions as a further step into the quest of the Romanian modernization process, Ferdinand Tönnies’s challenging hindsight might be useful to study in depth.

In the Gemeinschaft or the community, the “family life” leads to social “concord” since “its core is the tribe, nation or common people”.311 The “village life” is the closest one gets to what a society is. The customs of the Gemeinschaft are represented by “traditional morality”. As we go one step further, one encounters the most organized form of society in the world of the Gemeinschaft: the town, its core being the Church.312 The Gemeinschaft existence is socially regulated by the “domestic economy and household management”. Hence, according to Tönnies, “the norms for this are set by sympathy and mutual understanding” 313. The basic economic activity rests in agriculture.

It is not the same as the predominance of the modern type of social organization, which is denominated by Tönnies as the Gesselschaft, centered on the “big city life”314, where “convention” prevails. “Its core is competitive market Society in its most basic form.”315 The

310

Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Civil Society, Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 247. Ibidem, pp. 257-258. 312 Idem. 313 Ibidem, p. 258. 314 Idem. 315 Ibidem, p. 257. 311

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“national life” is surmounted by the vivid public interest for “politics and policy”, while “the State” lies at its core. “Public opinion” replaces the power of the religious spirit. Private morality is separated from public lawfulness. “Trade is the essence of the rational action.”316 At the same time, “industry” is defined as the “rational productive deployment of capital and sale of labour.”317

So far one can trace the same division between the two forms of societies in the Romanian case. The whole strenuous attempt at modernity, which is not yet finished for the entire society not even at the moment we write these words down, has been the clash of the Gemeinschaft with the newly-borne Gesselschaft.

“The communitarian model did not disintegrate in the twilight of the Middle Ages. It continues to live in the thinking of the intellectuals who speak about the , about traditions, about the ties between morals and politics, about the conservative spirit. It exists in the environs which remain closely attached to tradition, especially in the villages of the Eastern European continent. This model has been questioned by the new model which made its headway after the Renaissance, more so due to the intellectual Revolution of the seventeenth century: the contractualist or the associative model. The communitarian model had been attacked and discredited by the collectivist model imposed by force in the Eastern European lands in our century.”318

It is self-evident that the communitarian model Alexandru Duțu refers to is the Gemeinschaft typology and the enlightened theory of contractualism is another kind of expressing the modern Gesselschaft. However, contrary to Ferdinand Tönnies’ conclusion that the latter will replace the former in the progress of history, Alexandru Duțu relies on his belief that “conserving” might be possible and relevant. The Romanian society at large reacted to the pressures of the free market and the impact of the big urban life no more differently than most 316

Ibidem, p. 258. Idem. 318 Alexandru Duțu, Idee de Europa și evoluția conștiinței europene, All Educational, București, 1999, p. 133. 317

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European societies. Nonetheless, the Gesselschaft is a work in progress that for other Western and Central European societies has been accomplished decades, if not centuries, ago.319 This is an issue we will return to in the final section of this chapter.

Another paramount difference between the two sociological orders is what the law is and how it functions in the daily life. To quote from Ferdinand Tönnies once more:

”Furthermore, there are two contrasting legal systems. The first is a mutually binding system of positive law, of enforceable norms regulating the relationships of individuals one with another. It has its roots in family life and its concrete embodiment in the ownership of land. Its forms are basically determined by custom, which religion consecrates and transfigures, if not as divine will then as the will of wise rulers who interpret the divine will in trying to adapt and improve those forms. The second system is also a system of positive law which is devoted to upholding the separate identities of rational individuals in the midst of all their combinations and entanglements. It has its natural basis in the formal regulation of trade and similar business but attains superior validity and binding force only through the sovereign will and power of the state. Law of this kind becomes one of the most important instruments of policy; it is used to sustain, restrain or encourage social trends, and is publicly contested or upheld by public doctrine and public opinion, through which it is altered to become stricter or more lenient.”320

It is clear that, from the historical data we have mentioned in the previous chapter, the path to modernity chosen by the Romanian elites in the first half of the nineteenth century had been wholeheartedly Western. Alexandru Duțu envisages this model as incompatible to the eastern European Orthodox legacy or rather he assumes that there is room for a middle-way between the cultural heritage and the modern institutions. There could have been a Romanian way to modernity that would have taken into account the specificities of the local people. 319

Paul Hohenberg, Lynn Lees, The Making of Urban Europe, 1000-1994, Harvard University Press, 1996, pp. 331379. 320 Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Civil Society, Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 247.

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However, this had not been the case. The process of Westernization coincided, at least theoretically, with the birth of the modern national-state. The laws have been borrowed through verbatim translation in the institutions of the state. Conversely, the society itself was lagging behind both economically and politically. It is in Ferdinand Tönnies’ dichotomy between the two interpretations of the laws at the social level which solves the case: the functioning of the laws has been personalized, based on mutual relations. This traditional burden is responsible for the resilience with which the social body had tolerated the administrative corruption present in the state apparatus. The elite were not held accountable for its flaws and shortcomings since the “wise rulers” held a symbolic sway over an illiterate and dispassionate multitude of peasants. Romania was caught in the cobweb of the Gemeinschaft long after its state, designed to fit a modern commercial citizen-oriented Gesselschaft, had been created.

The contradiction between a traditional lifestyle, which has the village life as its core, and the urban dynamism of intense capitalistic productivity could be traced also in the “spirit of the laws”321 that govern the two different realms: on the one hand, a social order where the absolute fidelity to the informal rules of the community is paramount for one’s survival and social respectability, on the other hand, the modern metropolis, where the rules of conduct are in direct connection to the economic prospects of the employed worker and the capitalist inventiveness of the entrepreneur.

In the Romanian case, the modernization process had been directed from the top-down crystallization of the modern state. The society might follow in the modern state’s footsteps. Contrary to the Romantic radical liberal generation of 1848, the society was not moving at the same pace as the modernizers’ plans were being written down. Consequently, the Gemeinschaft adapted, yet internally refused to accept, to the institutional demands of a state fit for the social order of the urban middle ranks, a truly Gesselschaft that was nowhere to be spotted in south-eastern Europe. The Gemeinschaft

321

Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Civil Society, Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 211-222.

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“takes for granted a certain solidarity among human beings as a natural and necessary mode of existence; indeed, it assumes that a protoplasm of law is a spontaneous and inevitable product of collective life and thought. Further elaboration of this legal thought is due essentially to what could be called its own intrinsic development, that is, to the reasoned application of it by whoever first began it. This is what is meant by the theory that there is a law which nature teaches to all sentient beings and which as such is common to all mankind.”322

Alexandru Duțu employs the communitarian spirit in the guise of a twentieth century Gemeinschaft, which is paradoxical to say the least:

“In the communitarian model, the public good is rooted in , in what defines us from a historical point of view, or in holding on to a set of customs (…); in the contractualist model it is what we agree on that counts.”323

The overarching will of the community is discussed by the German sociologist as expressive for the Gemeinschaft and it is absent from the urban modern Gesselschaft324. For Alexandru Duțu, it is rather the communitarian spirit that he defends in a modern European setting:

“(…) in the European political construction one should not keep in mind only the theoretical assumptions of the contractualist model: one can suppose that the communitarian model is more capable of giving a new shape to Europe than individual liberalism. In any case, the modern public space, which could only be delineated and maintained only by a strong public opinion, must be also dominated by values, not only by the . Therefore, education and culture are essential.”325

322

Idem, p. 211-212. Alexandru Duțu, Idee de Europa și evoluția conștiinței europene, All Educational, București, 1999, p. 137. 324 Ibidem. 325 Ibidem, p. 138. 323

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To Alexandru Duțu, the unchallenged impetus of the secular spirit had changed the sphere of the public liberties, but had neglected the inner freedom of man, which turned into a matter of private concern. And it is solely due to the orthodox traditional mindset that the eastern countries share a deep understanding of the spiritual freedom “and have no reason to diminish it in order to respect the norms deduced from other confessional traditions.”326

In the logic of the Gemeinschaft, Alexandru Duțu looks for the reasons behind the projects of fast and radical modernization, which are the backbone of the industrial Gesselschaft:

“Two contemporary phenomena threaten pluralism and the triggering of the extended solidarities based on pluralism: the pressure of the mass civilization, which envisages the massification and the destruction of the elites; the assault of the immediacy and of the material upon the life of the mind.”327

These topics have been addressed cogently by Hannah Arendt in her study of the mob mentality328.

Overall, the world-from-within where the oral and the scriptural mindset have coalesced is representative for what Alexandru Duțu calls the associanist model and the German social scientist Ferdinand Tönnies Gemeinschaft, while the-outside-world, that for Alexandru Duțu stands both for the production of material wealth and the public sphere, is the modernization model imported in the European eastern outskirts during the nineteenth century, what, in other words, Tönnies designated as the Gesselschaft. For Duțu, the collectivism of the public sphere under communist regimes is the radical development, undemocratic at its point of origin, of the contractualist paradigm.

326

Ibidem, p. 140. Ibidem, p. 150. 328 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Harcourt Brace & Company, 1976, 305-341. 327

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“In this regard, one should bring up the fate of the communitarian model in our culture, deformed both by the liberal attack and by the confusion created by collectivism. Nonetheless, the model is present at the most representative public figures of our culture, the same ones that have exercised a considerable influence on the mentalities in our country, such as Eminescu or Iorga.”329

Truly, Alexandru Duțu was well aware what place the contractualist approach to society occupied in the modern world and how it can be traced in his criticism of the Marxist doctrine and not in any circumstance, but in the case of the European revolutions of 1848, which have been the cornerstone of the new social organization in south-eastern Europe and had a longlasting impact in the intellectual world.

“It has been assumed by the Marxist criticism that the attack against stands for the revenge of irrationalism on the success of the 1848 rationalist thinking; in fact, it is the reply of the organic solidarities to the forms of the organized solidarity imposed from above by the State made up of the generation of 1848. The criticism of the enforced modernity had nothing to do with irrationalism, since it had been accomplished by the representatives of the Romanian rationalism within Junimea: the critique was directed against the excessive authoritarianism in the public life and it is very much to the point.”330

To Duțu, the fast modernization would necessarily imply the reaction of the social forces that had been the defenders of the spiritual values denied by “the individualist liberalism” and by the fast growing urban bourgeoisie. The communitarian model was so widespread that the contractualist paradigm, embodied in the state, required the nation, the ethnically-centered gnosis to be accepted by the wide community. Hence, by appealing to the romanticized ethnic history, the communitarian spirit of the Gemeinschaft would be won to the side of the

329

Idem, p. 171. On the question of the political ideas of Mihai Eminescu, cf. Ioan Stanomir, Reacțiune și conservatorism, editura Nemira, București, 2000, pp. 196-267 and on the possible legacy of Nicolae Iorga, cf. Ioan Stanomir, Spiritul conservator. De la Barbu Catargiu la Nicolae Iorga, editura Curtea Veche, București, 2008. 330 Idem, p. 176.

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reformist elite. Thus, the social cohesion would be preserved, while the citizen would be embedded in the law, but would not constitute a realistic social entity. Consequently, the nationalist populace would replace the ideal of the vivid social sphere of urban citizens. Some of these issues have been already covered by us in depth in the first part of the previous chapter.

“Unceasingly looking from the inside to the outside and from the individual to the community, it seems to us that the three aspects which clearly stand out and should be given close consideration: the relation between the 331 and the State, the identity form based on the nationalist ideology which has been grossly exaggerated by the communists, the relation between our spiritual tradition and the civilization of the body that dominates our contemporary world.”332

Therefore, as already mentioned earlier in our demonstration, Alexandru Duțu is in search of the cultural level, passed on from the past tradition, of the common European mindset. The regional ties and the local traits add the necessary shade to a cultural heritage that should be on the course of creating a common cultural consciousness. All in all, what is the contribution of Alexandru Duțu’s works and ideas to the whole debate about the modernization process in modern Romania? How can we tackle his contribution in the general contention we have discussed in the previous chapter? The next pages are dedicated to this delicate issue.

The modernizing effort of the antimodernists

Although a historian of literature, Antoine Compagnon is also a historian of ideas, even more so of the groundbreaking criticisms of modern life belonging to some of the classical writers of the nineteenth century. The concept of anti-modernity is muddy and unclear as a scientific tool, but

331 332

The Romanian original is “legea strămoșească”. Alexandru Duțu, Idee de Europa și evoluția conștiinței europene, All Educational, București, 1999, p. 228.

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Antoine Compagnon defines the anti-modern literary creators333, from the 1800s onwards, not really as traditionalists or idealists of the past, not even conservatives in any political sense, but rather as disenchanted modernists. The loss of any higher ideal in the quest for modernity was typical of the French intellectual elite all throughout the nineteenth century and had culminated in pessimistic visions of modernity and even a moral and aesthetic contempt for modern urban life. Anti-modernists, in the sense given to the term by Antoine Compagnon, are naturally those who look skeptically at any form of change and who consider the revolutionary zeal of 1789 as being essentiality erroneous and misguiding in its accomplishments. The opposition to the pressures of the industrial city, the feeling of insecurity in a hectic fast-moving market of commodities, the belief in scientific progress have all been scrutinized by the anti-modern artist and cast away as hindering in its effects for the human consciousness. Bad art became synonymous with the obsession for kitsch in the mass production of goods and services. What the masses liked was something to be necessarily loathed by the artists. A return to the austere morality of by-gone ages or the support given to the lack thereof were seen as better than upholding the bourgeois way of life and its stultifying values. The last remains of the withering nobility were being preserved and admired as a symbol of outstanding human achievement. The egalitarian uniformity of the modern setting scared the intellectual out of his wits. The prison of the factory life, together with the vicious portrayal of the state intrusion into private matters through the means of the bureaucracy, forced the anti-modern intellectual to withstand from entering public life and criticize the very foundations of liberalism and modern democracy. While not asking for the return to any wishful status quo ante, the intellectual of the midnineteenth century deplored the mechanized everyday living in the modern West and embraced the ideal of self-isolation from the society of the mob. The anti-modern is a modern caught into the tides of history, but who does not wish to give up the symbolic edifice of the 333

Antoine Compagnon, Antimodernii. De la Joseph de Maistre la Roland Barthes, editura Art, București, 2008, pp. 11-26.

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past: works of arts and the values expressed by them, especially the heritage of individual freedom. Scholarly, melancholic, religious-minded, counterrevolutionary, mocking in harsh words both the mob democracy and the project of the Enlightenment, the anti-modern has often been identified as a reactionary. Similar arguments will be the subject of the writer’s fate in modern surroundings during the nineteenth century in the works of Paul Bénichou334. The writers and the artists seemed to have lost their spiritual appeal within modern settings and, with the bankruptcy of their symbolic power, art itself began to weaken as a singular force and soon to be accepted in order to become a modern commodity among others. The hedonistic demand of the public turned into the demise of art. A new crisis of values had been installed, as in any other previous historical transition where the old and the new fought for their very own survival. At the same time, as Isaiah Berlin335 argues, the expressive support given to the prestige and the virtues the individual possesses (at odds with any collectivistic ideology) had insulated part of the intellectuals in the age of Romanticism from the successful attempts of describing reality both by the empirical results of modern science and by the force of reason – the solid ground of the enlightened thinking. The emphasis given to private merit in an dynamic society that lived off the rational productivity of state-of-the-art industry did not take into account the massive social disruptions the process of industrialization brought about in many Western society around mid-nineteenth century. For the intellectuals of the age it was rather either the Church or nobody else which could alleviate the problems faced by modern capitalist societies exposed to impersonal market forces. The state was envisaged as ominous and lethal for the individual liberty. Nationalism could supplement the need for a common symbolical order, since the Church was rapidly losing its grip on society, but the staunch anti-modernists refused that also.

334

Paul Bénichou, The Consecration of the Writer, 1750-1830, Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. 335

Isaiah Berlin, Against the Current. Essays in the History of Ideas, Princeton University Press, 2001, pp. 19-22.

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“The rejection of the central principals of the Enlightenment – universality, objectivity, rationality, and the capacity to provide permanent solutions to all genuine problems of life or thought, or (not less important) accessibility of rational methods to any thinker armed with adequate powers of observation and logical thinking – occurred in various forms, conservative and liberal, reactionary or revolutionary, depending on which systematic order was being attacked. (…) Others despised public life in principal, and occupied themselves with the cultivation of the inner spirit. In all cases the organization of life by the application of rational or scientific methods, any form of regimentation or conscription of men for utilitarian ends or organized happiness, was regarded as the philistine enemy.” 336 Part of these tenets would be addressed and reshaped so to suit the times long after the 1800s. The literary anti-modernists, who were the real savers of modern freedom in their times, had sometimes, contrary to the opinion of Antoine Compagnon, shared deeply conservative, even reactionary, opinions. Undoubtedly, these ideas were past their time and hinted more to the awkward unwillingness to adapt to a radically changing social order. However, given the amounts of energy expanded to bring about the industrial revolution and how the economic dynamism was reshaping the social structure from down-up, the anti-modern intellectuals defended their position suitably. Discarding the rational idealism of the eighteenth century, the progressive fantasies of their forerunners, had been the task that the anti-moderns struggled to achieve. “What the entire Enlightenment has in common is the denial of the central Christine doctrine of original sin, believing instead that man is born either innocent and good, or morally neutral and malleable by education or environment, or, at worst, deeply defective but capable of radical and indefinite improvement by rational education in favourable circumstances, or by a revolutionary reorganization of society as demanded, for example, by Rousseau. It is this denial of original sin that the church condemned most severely in Rousseau’s Émile, despite its attack on materialism, utilitarianism and atheism.”337

336

Idem.

337

Ibidem.

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How could the intellectuals cope with a social system that left little room for them, as long as they strongly desired to exert intellectual pressure and be unrestricted by worldly affairs at the same time? They chose to chastise rather than to mildly criticize an age that seemed to be out of its joints. The leftist historian account states it as such: “In brief, the world of 1840s was out of balance. The forces of economic, technical and social change released in the half-past century were unprecedented, and even to the most superficial observer, irresistible. Their institutional consequences, on the other hand, were as yet modest. It was, for instance, inevitable that sooner or later legal slavery and serfdom (except as relics in remote regions as yet untouched by the new economy) would have to go, as it was inevitable that Britain could not for ever remain the only industrialized country. It was inevitable that landed aristocracies and absolute monarchies must retreat in all countries in which a strong bourgeoisie was developing, whatever the political compromises or formulae found for retaining status, influence and even political power. Moreover, it was inevitable that the injection of political consciousness and permanent political activity among the masses, which was the great legacy of the French Revolution, must sooner or later mean that these masses were allowed to play a formal part in politics. And given the remarkable acceleration of social change since 1830, and the revival of the world revolutionary movement, it was clearly inevitable that the changes – whatever their precise institutional nature – could not be long delayed.”338 However, what was already common as a modern malaise in the Western Europe could hardly be traced in the Eastern lands. Here, the advent of capitalism was patiently waited for in countries such as Romania. The heavy fist of tradition was a power to reckon with. The political elites were in charge of all economic affairs. There was no threat from an active menacing bourgeoisie before the 1900s, as Constantin Dobrogeanu Gherea’s analysis pinpointed and as Ștefan Zeletin recognized in the 1920’s as well.

338

Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution. Europe 1789-1848, Abacus, London, 2009, p. 366.

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The newly founded states were institutionally designed by a minority of noblemen, steeped in the European Romantic culture of the age, who lacked both the capitalistic incentive and the scientifically progressive surge of the revolutionary West. The urban centers were plainly backward and represented strongholds of economic underdevelopment. The modern industry that had damaged the Western countryside339 was invisible anywhere in Eastern Europe. The society itself remained unshaken in its structures until the close of the century. The potential socialist danger was irrelevant without a strong union of workers and where there was no massive proletariat there could be no strong leftist thinkers. So where does the fight between a moderate liberal, which does not at all resemble the radical demands of the working classes in nineteenth century Europe, and a dispassionate conservative originate from in the backward hinterland of Eastern Europe? For the historian of ideas in the nineteenth century, the great landowners, the high-ranked nobleman of Romania for instance are altogether mildly liberal and staunchly conservative.

“Only the counter-attack of opposing classes and their tendency to break through the limits of the existing order causes the conservative mentality to question the basis of its own dominance, and necessarily brings about among the conservatives historical-philosophical reflections concerning themselves. Thus, there arises a counter-utopia which serves as a means of self-orientation and defense.”340

What place does a criticism of modernity occupy in pre-modern surroundings? The reasons should be spotted locally under the increasing pressure posed by Western capitalism’s dominance of world markets. The West itself was “the opposing classes” to the backward latefeudal East. The eastern elites, who were collecting their wealth from serfdom, had no desire to turn into affluent businessmen. They lacked the social incentive to man up into genuine practical capitalists. “The critical stance of the aristocracy toward any notion that wealth is a

339 340

Paul Johnson, The Vanished Landscape, Phoenix, 2005. Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, Routledge Classics in Sociology, 1998, p. 207.

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desirable end in itself has helped the aristocracy to preserve the aesthetic dimension of life.” 341 Nobody can deny the high consideration the French-inspired man of letters has occupied in the mindset of the Eastern European elite.

And to quote even further in the larger context of the Eastern Europe, including also the Russian lands: “Reactionary social theories are liable to flourish in a landed upper class that manages to hang onto political power successfully although it is losing out economically or perhaps is threatened by a new and strange source of economic power (a fear underlying currents of thought in the American antebellum South). At several points in this book there has been occasion to notice that, where commercial relationships have begun to undermine a peasant economy, the conservative elements in society are likely to generate a rhetoric of extolling the peasant as the backbone of society.”342 Has not this been the case with the intellectual movements expressing the purity, dignity and the cultural importance of the peasantry around 1900? Where did the socialist populism of the Narodnik movement in Imperial Russia343 emanate as a counter-tendency if not from the openness to capitalist innovations of the Russian economy after 1880 that were jeopardizing the established order? Was the Poporanist intellectual school in Romania any different in its socio-economic causes? Were not the economic circumstances and the social system relatively similar between the Russian Imperial order and, for instance, the Kingdom of Romania around the turn of the century?344 Had it not been for the liberal values cherished by the local intelligentsia, Romania would have been a case in point of a country based on the Russian model in the nineteenth century.

341

Barrington Moore Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World, Penguin University Press, 1974, p. 490. 342 Ibidem, p. 491. 343 th Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialists Movements in 19 Century Russia, Phoenix Press, 2001 344 Abbot Gleason (editor), A Companion to Russian History, Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, pp. 180-243.

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What did the eastern European peasantry look for in the modernization process? Cogently, Barrington Moore Jr. offers a possible answer: “Liberty too meant getting rid of the overlord who no longer gave them protection but now used his ancient privileges to take away their land or make them work on his for nothing. Fraternity meant the village as a cooperative economic and territorial unit, little more. From the peasant, it seems, the idea may have passed to intellectuals who developed their theories about the depersonalization of modern life and the curse of bureaucratic bigness, looking backward through a romantic haze to what they thought they saw in the village community. All this would have seemed, I suspect, quite odd and incomprehensible to the peasant who had daily experience of the vicious quarrels over property and women common in his own village. For the peasant, fraternity was more a negative notion, a form of localism. The peasant had no abstract reason in feeding the town. His organic conception stopped quite short of altruism. For him, were and are mainly a source of taxes and debt.”345 Is this the organic community that comprised the Orthodox mentality, blending the scriptural and the oral into a single theoretical entity, which Alexandru Duțu was advocating for? Not at all, yet apparently, this is exactly the left-inclined interpretation of the events. To quote even further on the intricate question of organic communities and modern societies in their quest for social and economic development: “The fact that the non-agrarian sectors of the economy were underdeveloped up to the end of the nineteenth century also contributed to the survival of traditional agricultural methods in the eastern zone. Industry, trade, and urbanization were undeveloped, so that those who lived from this sector were nearly as much in servitude as were the peasants. From the late seventeenth century the state took important steps to develop industry and towns but this was limited mostly to the military realm and was never in organic relation to the rest of the economy. West European military techniques meant an inescapable 345

Barrington Moore Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World, Penguin University Press, 1974, pp. 498-499.

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challenge for Russia, so tsarist policy strived to create a military equilibrium, especially under Peter I. The modernization that resulted had no real effect on the economy as a whole, though, because manufacture was limited to military needs and was carried out by serfs. The direct economic impact of Western Europe on the vast territories of continental Eastern Europe did not appear until late in the nineteenth century. Characteristically for the inflexible rigidity of the whole society, it took an immense military defeat to shock tsarist absolutism into carrying out any of the most necessary modernization, even in the military sector. And because only the most necessary changes were made, continental Eastern Europe had to suffer yet other shocks before finally opening itself to the world market. Even then, the opening was never completed.”346

The prospects of modernization in Romania, during the 1850s and onwards, had been bleak and misfortunate. A society does not change all of a sudden if the elites wish it to. The elites need to alter as well, even if this would mean the self-sacrifice of their economic stakes and reforming their political creeds on the prospects of modernization within a given society. Irrespective of the reformist ideas, of the ideological skirmishes within the Parliament, it is the society that needs to change and the top-down reforms have to be directed against the prevailing social system if there is any true desire of or pressure for development. The question is whether the overall criticism to the modernization process, expressed by the theory of forms without content, is an honest one. Capitalism took over a society in the midst of a different mode of production, laws and public mores than the one experienced by the West at the time of the Industrial Revolution. “Today we can observe ‘under-developed countries’ that have barely attained the level of tribal organization passing directly to capitalist forms, or even socialist forms according to the social sphere which influence them, just as they pass directly from the hoe to the tractor and the ox cart to the airplane without going through intermediary stages. In an analogous way one must admit that the arrival of capitalism, as a form of social 346

Daniel Chirot (editor), The Origins of Backwardness in Eastern Europe: economics and politics from the Middle Ages until the early twentieth century, University of California Press, 1991, p. 83.

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organization, must have had direct as well as indirect effects on the whole of the contemporary world according to what stage the various backward countries had reached.”347 From Titu Maiorescu to Eugen Lovinescu the liberal values have been wholeheartedly embraced. However, even by the standards of 1900, as astutely proved by Bogdan Murgescu’s economic history348, Romania had no local self-sustainable industry and the large estates of the landlords were still the heart of the economic life. How could a society act liberal at the thin top of the society and hang on to feudal relations at the thick bottom? The criticism of the Junimea school of thinking might be indicative for the shallow efforts of the state to “civilize” the whole society, but the same liberal conservatives in the Junimea had little to criticize in the way the political elites, composed of agricultural lords, were doing slightly anything to bring the industrial Western model to the country. It would have been self-defeating if they had proceeded otherwise. The demise of an entire social order would have erupted. Yet, without a stable bourgeoisie there is no lean pathway to a democratic wealthy society. The interwar period had witnessed the radicalness of far right mass political parties. Barrington Moore’s assessment covers the Romanian case as well. Theda Skocpol’s interpretation of state building describes the social structure cogently: “Autocratic and protobureaucratic monarchies give way to bureaucratic and massincorporating national state. The prerevolutionary landed upper classes were no longer privileged in society and politics. They lost their special roles in controlling the peasants and shares of the agrarian surpluses through local and regional quasi-political institutions.”349 The billow of the Poporanist view of the Romanian peasantry, as embodiment of a future agrarian state, embodies the disappointment and the frustration of the elites with other members of the elite that have been unable to properly modernize Romania. The new agrarian

347

Henri H. Stahl, Traditional Romanian Village Communities, Cambridge University Press, The digitally printed version 2008, p. 5 348 Bogdan Murgescu, România și Europa, editura Polirom, Iași, 2010, pp. 103-205. 349 Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions, Harvard University Press, 1979, p. 161.

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utopias of returning to a distinguished modern Arcadia around 1900 seems little short of what the Romanian fascists had dreamt about decades later. The social-democratic criticism of Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea is remarkably shrewd for its age, but, since the society was predominantly agrarian, the left-oriented proposals at speedy social reforms are identical to the liberal calls for industrialization and capitalistic development. To all these burdensome queries, Alexandru Duțu’s cultural comprehension of pre-modern and modern Romanian history is almost completely at stake with. To him, the Romanian mentality, forged in centuries of Slavic Orthodox and Byzantine intertwining, had been misunderstood by its elites during the nineteenth century. Importing the Western mindset would have proved more efficient if the elites had considered the legacy of the cultural tradition appropriately, instead of condescendingly wiping it out. All the attempts to modernize the Romanian society have been more or less a failure because the planners did not thoroughly take into account all the small bits which compose the Eastern mentality. The dichotomies between the world-fromwithin and the outside-world, the scriptural and oral mindsets, the distinctive European Eastern traditions, the religious soul of the Easterner are to Alexandru Duțu the pillars of the Orthodox world. Romania had only been a part of it. Where could we place this conservative analysis? Is it liberal or not? And why to blame the unprofitable economic schemes of Eastern Europe in the latter half of the nineteenth century on the cultural legacy when the capitalist relations did not reach a point from which the society could finally accomplish its breakthrough into modernity? All these issues will be addressed in the final chapter.

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Chapter 5 - A World Lost in Religion The Case of Tradition Alexandru Duțu’s penchant for reestablishing a sense of community within which religion positions itself as central to the question of a modern mindset is a reality that our study cannot do without. Ever since Alexandru Duțu had begun reading and acquiring a special interest in the old liturgical literature published in the Romanian Principalities between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries350, the place occupied by religion in his understanding of the modernization process in the region had grown proportionally in importance. Later on, the enlightened humanism Alexandru Duțu will identify as a token of the spirit present in the literature of the 1750-1800s in Moldavia and Wallachia, which is brimming with the religious influence both of Orthodox traditions governed by the Church and old folkloric traditions, most of that having been interspersed with the official religion in the daily practice. “Grounded in political problems, the cultural movement prevalent in the Romanian countries clearly develops in the second half of the seventeenth century: humanism crystalizes an idea of manhood, while the orthodox rationalism – a cultural program which continues in the eighteenth century, maintains itself under the guise of a tradition of thinking, through subsequent processes of transformation, in the humanism that is not a historical category, but a permanent proof of civilization. The diversity of intellectual activities highlights the necessity of education, through the means of the written speech and the arts; the accent stressed on the evolution in time of the community shifts the social consciousness from the confessional spirit to the historical one, at the same time with a perspective on the masses formed by those who work and fight effectively for justice and freedom. By amplifying the field of moral knowledge, the intellectual activity grants an increased percentage of time to the ethical value and this will open the vista for the decline of religion. All of these combined tendencies contribute to the drawing up of a cultural direction, the logical rigor (the main influence of the neo-Aristotelism instilled in the 350

Alexandru Duțu, Coordonate ale culturii românești în secolul al XVIII-lea, editura pentru Literatură, București, 1968.

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academic institutions since the time of Corydaleu) subordinating the intellectual life to the civic aims, that is, in a broad sense, the educational, ethical and political aims.” 351 The shift at the level of mentalities becomes more visible as the nineteenth century proceeds onwards. To Alexandru Duțu the place occupied by religion, although it does melt away in other intellectual influences, is a trademark of the way the modernization process, initiated after the 1800s, had had an impact on the region. Although we have referred to in the previous chapter that the process of social and cultural transformations along the lines of mentalities triggers a regression of the community ties (Gemeinschaft), expressed also through religion, and an acceleration of the civic contractualism (Gesselschaft)352, Alexandru Duțu supports a different opposite view: the sociological metamorphosis from the rural to the urban areas during the nineteenth century does not require casting out the religious heritage. Despite losing its huge traditional influence, religion is not relegated to a second-hand position either. “In the city in which the merchants are gaining more and more influence, the boyars are engaging in commerce and in the forms of capitalistic production, while the impulse brought about by the communes which have held on to most of their autonomy is always present; it is here where the written culture is constantly developing; however, willing to discover new ways towards development, burdened by a past frequently dominated by abuses and often lacking enough financial support capable of imposing its intellectual hegemony, the city develops into a culture in which the tensions within its social structure are reflected and which stands, in fact, for a crisis of consciousness.”353 There is a slight historical piece of information that is needed at this point of our analysis. Around 1800s, the percentage of urban inhabitants across Western and Central Europe was around 15%. However, the rates of urbanization in the three historical largely Romanianspeaking provinces were quite modest to say the least. Transylvania had an urban population of 351

Alexandru Duțu, Sinteză și originalitate în cultura română, editura Enciclopedică română, București, 1972, p. 72. Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Civil Society, Cambridge University Press, 2001. 353 Alexandru Duțu, Sinteză și originalitate în cultura română, editura Enciclopedică română, București, 1972, p. 163. 352

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7,1%, Moldavia of 5,8% and Wallachia stood at 5,7%. The archaic economic practices, the modest levels of agricultural output, the precarious condition of capitalistic and cultural accumulations, the social cleavages and the weakness of the state had widened the gap between the Romanian countries and other territories in Europe.354 Alexandru Duțu places the urban dynamism and the social clash of ideas and political principles, mostly of Western import, in a social context that was lagging behind in every aspect to the Western counterpart. “The interpenetration of cultural levels, which could be traced back in the preceding chapters, becomes now so vigorous that it leaves a mark on the whole age of Enlightenment. We recall from the series of major aspects of this phenomenon only two of them. First of all, the fact that the impressive nature of the enlightened concepts, bound together in the written culture, did not act towards a closed intellectual system under the pretense of a theocratic hegemony and expressing the cultural predominance of the aristocracy; it acted towards realistic objectives, attacking the pyramidal construction of the aristocracy and its tip, those who were using a foreign language, had adopted the fashion of the ruling power which they served obsequiously, thus increasing the level of abuses. What they were asking for was to abolish the economic and social backwardness, but they never talk about a spiritual backwardness.”355 Religion is not seen by the reforming elite as a cultural burden. Nonetheless, what Alexandru Duțu seems to miss is that the Ottoman Empire was losing its grip on the south-eastern lands of Europe at the same time that the Romanian elites had adopted the fashion, the language and the ideas of the most “civilized” (in their terms, however) country of the West at the time, that is France. Following the Treaty of Vienna of 1815, the eastern lands in Europe had entered the commercial network dominated by the countries of the West, when the Industrial Revolution was heading toward its nineteenth century pinnacle. At the same time, it is disputable to what degree is the Orthodox spirit prone to accepting the ties and the requirements of social and 354

Bogdan Murgescu, România și Europa, editura Polirom, Iași, 2010, pp. 59-63. Alexandru Duțu, Sinteză și originalitate în cultura română, editura Enciclopedică română, București, 1972, p. 164. 355

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economic change. To Max Weber356, the spirit of Protestantism, which had manifested itself also in the economic realm during the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, was deep inside based on the prescripts of practical reasoning that led to a disenchantment of the world (die Entzauberung der Welt). It is this spirit that favored, although it did not create, the capitalist expansion within and without the Protestant society. For Alexandru Duțu, the question of religion is not just one among others, but it stands at the core of the society. “It is usually stated that the organizational aspects of living together are a problem that pertains to political science: but if political science will isolate itself and will consider only the political deed, the explanations will not be convincing, because it will show partiality. In the public realm, man does not only engage his political thought and public action: in every circumstance, man participates with his/her whole being.”357 Alexandru Duțu is adamant in his struggle for “a European political construction which stems from the private life [of the individual].” In his retrospective assessment of the gradual decline of the private sphere and the ever increasing tendency of the public one in the last centuries before the advent of modernity358, Alexandru Duțu states: “It does not seem clear to us to affirm that modern and > are based on an attack against human liberty, since the monarchic order absorbs both the great impetus towards divinity and the need for isolation and individualization. Following this attack, the modern political power had not only opened the paths towards altering the public and the private spheres, but had also changed it in the sense that both spheres have begun to be in relation to the political power.”359 To Alexandru Duțu, the cause of all this social and political turmoil evinced by the break-up between the private and the public spheres had coincided with the birth of the modern state.

356

Max Weber, Etica protestantă și spiritul capitalismului, editura Humanitas, București, 2003, pp. 5-21. Alexandru Duțu, Ideea de Europa și evoluția conștiinței europene, editura All, București, 1999, p. 89. 358 Ibidem, pp. 89-94. 359 Ibidem, p. 94. 357

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“Reformation had encouraged the private silent reading and had impelled the printing of text, at the same time when the State had supported the universal character of the public instruction in order to educate citizens according to its purposes. The state had eaten through the private sphere proclaiming the necessity of defending the community: the confessional wars and the civil conflicts had confirmed the opinions of those supporting the State who have slowly, but decisively, taken over activities that belonged to the private realm, such as education, defense, the organization of the economic activity, braying the authority of the pater familias, in the name of an unsubstantiated equality.”360 The type of thinking embraced by the State at the same time that the authority of the Church was slightly eroded was directed towards a sensible understanding of the natural world. This also led to the development in the natural sciences during the eighteenth century.361 “The new form of political organization, the State, had attracted in its service the heads of the Catholic Church and had subordinated the protestant churches. The Baroque, this European style, had spoken about an imaginariness which did not resort to a divine manifestation, but expressed the monarch’s and the bishop’s paternalism. Absolutism was dominating the Western world, yet not the England that brings Charles I to the scaffold, but Hobbes or Locke start a new with an abstract individual, when they speak about the basis of the human society as being different from the community, which is to be found in the compact between the individual and those around. Instead of the communitarian model, England promotes the contractualist model and this will attract Montesquieu and other continentals who impose new directions in the European political thinking. The Age of Enlightenment turns decisively in this direction when it associates politics with economy: the Scottish enlightened thinkers clearly state these new ties and they support the civic society, the one built around the diverse game of affections and utter interests. The Western world knows the presence of academies, societies, clubs, associations that have their say in political matters. John Locke establishes firmly the connection between liberty and property, at the same time proclaiming a new image of man: the child lacking general 360 361

Ibidem, p. 99. Ernst Cassirer, Filosofia Luminilor, editura Paralela 45, Pitești, 2003, pp. 19-97.

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ideas and knowledge will be ascribed to the school that will mold him according to the will of society, of course.”362 What worries Alexandru Duțu is the very possibility that the greatest European minds of the eighteenth century thought that the position of the Church as a cultural symbolic core is irrelevant and even detrimental to the project of modernity. Apparently, this type of reasoning had permeated the Eastern lands later on, during the first revolutionary decades of the nineteenth century, but the society at large would be exposed to it only after 1850. However, the process of secularization had been slow and tiresome since the universal education instilled by a national network of school would become a living reality after only the 1900s (the illiteracy rate was 61% in 1912363). As we know from the historical records, the illiteracy of the Romanian population in 1945 was still high in comparison to the European average (the illiteracy rate was 27% of the overall population in 1948, while in most Western and Central European countries it had been almost completely eliminated, irrespective of them being Protestant or Catholic).364 However, Alexandru Duțu criticizes a tendency, not a reality, which is modern and stems from the centers of modernity: the Western European civilizational example. What Alexandru Duțu is demanding has to do with “an overview” of things that have been gradually lost in the modernization scheme. “The overview is the one that can defend us from the perils of reductionism, of the tendency to reduce the extraordinary variety of the world to certain aspects, the one we know best. However, it was from reductionism that all the evils have sprung, in the form of racism, of economic determinism, of religious fanaticism.”365 When referring to the significance of religion in the south-European context, Alexandru Duțu emphasizes that

362

Alexandru Duțu, Ideea de Europa și evoluția conștiinței europene, editura All, București, 1999, p. 102. Bogdan Murgescu, România și Europa, Iași, editura Polirom, 2010, p. 310. 364 Ibidem, p. 386. 365 Alexandru Duțu, Ideea de Europa și evoluția conștiinței europene, editura All, București, 1999, p. 104. 363

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“for the Church-political power relation in the European south-east the distinction made by scholars of Orthodox inspiration between the world-from-within and the-outside-world, between the mundane world of fast deeds and the world of essences, of constants, of permanence is characteristic of the area.”366 To the Romanian historian, the divide between the two spheres is ontological. The Church is responsible for the soul of the individual in its progression to the eternal world. The political power “is preoccupied with the administration of the daily life of the being which needs food, to live together with others, to be defended from internal and external aggression. The Church had bestowed upon the political power the organization of daily existence in the economic and social spheres, concentrating on instilling the sacred into the mundane affairs of life.” 367 This is the core of the Byzantium civilization to Alexandru Duțu. No wonder than it did not stand any chance in comparison to the increased social dynamism of the West after the sixteenth century when the society was organized according to a static model of spiritual development, while the costs and benefits of the mundane affairs of survival were accrued to the State, as if the political power of State had positioned itself outside society, as a second secular Church, in control of its economic-unwise subjects. By contrast, the Romanian Principalities, due to the constant military strife between the foreign states in the region, could not contribute positively to that Byzantine organic solidarity. “The institutions and the forms of modern association did not grow from the game of interests and ties of people.”368 When the modernization process had been initiated in the nineteenth century, “the State had assumed these civic duties and had founded societies, universities, academies. The organized solidarity had engulfed the domains where the organic solidarity had not imposed itself.”369

366

Ibidem, p. 107. Ibidem, p. 108. 368 Idem. 369 Idem. 367

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This meant that the respective society was from the start part of the larger passive audience in the affairs of the political decision-makers. “Within the masses, lacking any elementary political knowledge whatsoever, politics is still thought as a science for the insiders, the art learned and mustered by others or just a scheme for the parvenu.”370 It is this “unbalance between the private and the public life” in the modern political thinking, especially in Romania, that is denounced by Alexandru Duțu as inadequate both for the religious residues preserved in the private life of the society exposed to the modernization process and for the communitarian spirit in a modern democratic setting. The lack of solidarity and the abstract aloof meaning attributed to values are two consequences of this social phenomenon. Implicitly, the “lack of a political debate” about these issues had led to the intellectuals’ appeal for xenophobic nationalism and the composite concept of the national state, more of an ethnic-based state than a community of citizens sharing equal rights and responsibilities under the rule of law. “The break up between the inner freedom and the public liberties continues to pose problems in regard to the individual consciousness and the public opinion.”371 And since in the Eastern lands of Europe the public sphere seems to belong to no one precisely (or rather the abstract concept of the sovereign State is in control of the public sphere), the mentalities working inside out in Western Europe are different on this issue: for the West, the private sphere percolates into the public one, fostering an acute sense of solidarity and a common mental framework in dealing with administrative matters. “In fact, one is faced with the change in the meaning of the concept of liberty which defines more the human being in relation to others and less in relation to oneself.” 372 Consequently, this disequilibrium is marred with internal inconsistencies that might influence the prospects of the citizen’s political liberties both in the West and the East: “While in the south-east the inner freedom does not clearly interact with the outside order and has not yet properly defined the limits of the public liberties, in the West the public

370

Idem, p. 109. Idem, p. 111. 372 Ibidem. 371

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control is ominously insinuating itself in the place occupied by the sacred and might simplify the inner self for the sake of public comfort.”373 The role of the state is sometimes criticized by Alexandru Duțu as a reservoir of public prejudices that influence the political culture at a given time: “The modern state, which has occupied a place more and more important in the chain of public institutions from Absolutism onwards, had taken control of the attributes of both the Church and the family and had elaborated more and more norms which had to rule over the private life of individuals. The totalitarian state, struck by elephantiasis, had rushed into man’s privacy and had choked the forms of organic patriotism, while, at the same time, its own type of patriotism had steadily lost its substance because it was hiding the interests of a restrictive group. Promoted by the totalitarian state, the organized patriotism always invents fictitious enemies, trying to suppress the forms of organic patriotism unsuited to its scheme (the politics regarding the minorities and the constant attack against foreigners, typifying the dictatorial conception). The moment it proceeds to excesses, the organized patriotism promoted by the totalitarian State turns into forms of autarchy and refuses its connections to foreign countries…”.374 For Alexandru Duțu the organic solidarities are the byproduct of the family relationships, which, of course, should be based on the paradigm of the nuclear family. The household is the heart of the community375. However, this organic solidarity is outside the public sphere.

“Each one of us is part of his family, with the close ones, with those who speak the same language and with those who share similar opinions: thus, an organic solidarity is built and this is followed by the solidarity created around the circle of power, an organized solidarity.”376

373

The Romanian word is “taină”. Alexandru Duțu, Lumea dinăuntru și lumea din afară, editura Universității din București, 2009, p. 258. 375 Ibidem, p. 264. 376 Ibidem. 374

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Apparently, and not without its good reasons, Alexandru Duțu’s dichotomy is exposed to various criticisms. The first one would be that there is no rule which affirms that the two solidarities are either permanent or natural. Hence, the concept of solidarity is a social construct, which could easily fit many contradictory circumstances. It changes at the same time the historical setting does. A more in-depth criticism originates in the unbalanced division of political power between the private and public spheres. According to the ancient Greek understanding of the whole matter, Hannah Arendt explains it as follows:

“What all Greek philosophers, no matter how opposed to polis life, took for granted is that freedom is exclusively located in the political realm, that necessity is primarily a pre-political phenomenon, characteristic of the private household organization, and that force and violence are justified in this sphere because they are the only means to master necessity for instance, by ruling over slaves-and to become free. Because all human beings are subject to necessity, they are entitled to violence toward others; violence is the pre-political act of liberating oneself from the necessity of life for the freedom of world. This freedom is the essential condition of what the Greeks called felicity, eudaimonia, which was an objective status depending first of all upon wealth and health.”377

The organized solidarity has no relation to the realm of politics in the ancient sense, while the prescriptions of the household were inhibiting the political life of the community. Going further, Hannah Arendt stipulates that the modern overview of the relation between the private and public realms had given up on the ancient division between the two:

“Since the rise of society, since the admission of household and housekeeping activities to the public realm, an irresistible tendency to grow, to devour the older realms of the political and private as well as the more recently established sphere of intimacy, has been one of the outstanding characteristics of the new realm. This constant growth, whose no less constant acceleration we can observe over at least three centuries, derives its strength from the fact 377

The Portable Hannah Arendt, Penguin Classics, 2003, p. 187.

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that through society it is the life process itself which in one form or another has been channeled into the public realm. The private realm of the household was the sphere where the necessities of life, of individual survival as well as of continuity of the species, were taken care of and guaranteed. One of the characteristics of privacy, prior to the discovery of the intimate, was that man existed in this sphere not as a truly human being but only as a specimen of the animal species man-kind. This, precisely, was the ultimate reason for the tremendous contempt held for it by antiquity. The emergence of society has changed the estimate of this whole sphere but has hardly transformed its nature. The monolithic character of every type of society, its conformism which allows for only one interest and one opinion, is ultimately rooted in the one-ness of mankind. It is because this one-ness of man-kind is not fantasy and not even merely a scientific hypothesis, as in the "communistic fiction" of classical economics, that mass society, where man as a social animal rules supreme and where apparently the survival of the species could be guaranteed on a worldwide scale, can at the same time threaten humanity with extinction.”378

To Alexandru Duțu, although in diverse historical circumstances, the household is the organic solidarity, while the image of the state ruling over the realm of public life is somewhat contrary to the prescripts of liberalism. On the one hand the state in control of a big government is criticized for endangering the private realm; on the other hand the public solidarity groups around a small group called “the circle of power.” For the Byzantine legacy present in the religious mindset of the people in Orthodox south-eastern Europe, the religious prerequisites had undermined the formation of a civic public sphere wherein the pursuit of material accomplishments would be controlled by reason alone.

Nevertheless, to Alexandru Duțu the importance of religion in terms of individual accomplishment and the fostering of a traditional ethos is the backbone of the Eastern European block of nations379. The question never posed by Alexandru Duțu is to what extent 378

Ibidem, p. 196-197. Alexandru Duțu, Political Models and National Identities in , editura Babel, București, 1998. 379

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the religious mindset, surviving in tatters after the Communist experiment of almost half a century in length, would challenge the secularist surge of modernity, which is the cornerstone of public discourse in all Western European countries. Could modernity and the religious mindset find a stable place in the public sphere without interfering with one another’s epistemological autonomy?

The question of religion should be addressed thoroughly at this point.

“The focal point of the discussion of the relation between freedom and equality is moved by the Christian religion to the inner world, in the realm of consciousness: at the same time, the problem of the relations between the citizenry and the political power is addressed in terms of the individual consciousness.”380

Of course, this consciousness is subdued by the precepts of the Christian morality. The deChristianization of the modern world had advanced at the rhythm and pace that the prospects of all-encompassing secular ideologies have turned out to be more and more influential.

“It is obvious that the laic spirit had reached a borderline and that its solutions have led to a dramatic deadline. The forms of manipulating the Church by the nationalist doctrine, as well as the overt attack on the Church by the materialist communist did not bring about any solutions, but, on the contrary, have deepened the psychological crisis, whetting a man against another. By attacking the Church, the materialist ideologies have spread the intolerance which destroys the solidarity and, hence, the bond of any society.” 381

Alexandru Duțu does not only support the religious mindset in modern settings, but he also proposes a social scheme that is derived essentiality from the tenets of Christianity.

380 381

Alexandru Duțu, Lumea dinăuntru și lumea din afară, editura Universității din București, 2009, p. 298. Ibidem, p. 301.

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“The coming back of the laics in the Church enlivens not only the institution, but also enlivens the whole society (…). It is the laics, who are responsible for creating the foundations of the social assistance, who support those in sickness, poor or old, starting from the level of the parish, where people get to know one another in the best possible way, going even further in identifying the means of their social protection, in a time when the state has not only lost its providential status, but cannot take the responsibility of its duties. The laics are entitled to educate the younger generation in a spirit which does not strive for the attainment of power, of giving information [to the Securitatea], of corruption: the civic education should be, like ever before, the task of the laics, but also in the broader perspective of the man created in the image of God, but not of the man whose origins is in the caves382. Only from this perspective, the theological institutes could organize research and debate centers where youngsters and elders could meet, people of different professions, to analyze the large issues of the contemporary world and to look for Christian solutions. Since the time has come to think up new cultural institutions, capable of developing not a foggy scientific esthetic theory, but a Christian civic spirit open to the life of each individual and to everybody as well.”383 The Christian-democratic urgency in the transitory post-communist period after the revolutions of 1989 is easily traceable in Alexandru Duțu’s articles in the first years after the fall of the old regime. The same set of opinions is present in the book Political Models and National Identities in . Most articles signed by Alexandru Duțu during the 1990s embrace a Christian moral ethos that should constitute the ideas behind a center-right political party which would rejuvenate the lost yet found civic solidarity of the Romanian society. Although his collaboration with the Securitate is an undisputed episode and there is a degree of moral blame in this (especially in the light of the moralistic discourse of Alexandru Duțu himself after 1989), the Romanian historian cannot be blamed that he suffered a revolutionary change in ideas after the collapse of the communist state.

382 383

The vernacular expression is “coborât din pom”, but I rendered it in a more English-like way. Alexandru Duțu, Lumea dinăuntru și lumea din afară, editura Universității din București, 2009, p. 302.

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On the contrary, most Christian-inspired proposals and social views are already present in his books written during the Communist period which were, as we have seen, mainly centered on questions of social, political mentalities in the region in pre-modern settings. There is no deeply secular inclination in Alexandru Duțu’s speech. However, there are traces which indicate that Alexandru Duțu sidelines with a nationalistic interpretation of the Romanian folk.

Notwithstanding the theoretical cobweb, there are elements in Alexandru Duțu’s studies that pinpoint to a vision of the modernization process which is necessarily at odds with the schools of thinking on the subject, including the Romanian ones, as we have managed to depict in a previous part of the current analysis. On the one hand, Alexandru Duțu refuses the nationalistic discourse of the state and how the nation-state had manipulated to its advantage the public agenda of the national interest ever since the nineteenth century; on the other hand, the essentialist understanding of the nation is embedded in Alexandru Duțu’s works and does not leave much room for a civic understanding of the nation, in which the rational citizen, based on the French or Anglo-Saxon models, decides the fate and the path of the community.

The stark division between the private sphere, that of the household, which in Western Europe is a matter of the individual’s will and decision, and the public sphere, where the public decision-making takes place, does not correspond to the modern status quo of the Western states. The individual is the cell of the society, but the intrusion of society, especially through the free market and the increased demand for consumption, is unprecedented in modern history. The place occupied by the organic ties, linked to religion and inherited prejudices through old customs and traditions, overshadows the organized civil body, inside which the rational decision-making holds the most important seat. There is also a cultural critique of the Western model in regard to the general traits of the individuals living in postmodern societies.

All in all, Alexandru Duțu’s assessment of the ongoing modern cultural paradigm for the Romanian society is largely critical and generally negative. The orthodox mentality, the social dialectics between the world-from-within and the outside-world, the supremacy of the soul and 182

its Christian salvation and the subordinate position of the society per se, every piece in the puzzle contributes to the traits of a conservative thinker. Nonetheless, Romania is still plagued by an unfinished modernization process. The economic records place Romania as situated significantly at the bottom in comparison to all Western and Central European countries. The degree of urban inhabitants and the lack of a fully-fledged division of labor as in the industrialized societies testify to a modestly modernized state and society. Contrary to a further enhancement of the modernization process, Alexandru Duțu stands out as a defender of tradition. His stance is set against the Western model as it is experienced in the last decades of the twentieth century.

Where could one insert Alexandru Duțu as a political thinker? To what family of thinkers could one associate him so that the burden of an ostensibly reactionary mindset be lifted up? Could it be possible that Alexandru Duțu stands alone? The next section of the following chapter will deal with these pressing issues. However, at the same time, we will embark on a conceptual analysis of the importance (or the lack thereof) of the religious spirit in modernity. It seems that Alexandru Duțu’s criticism had organized a defensive of the religious mindset within a modern society.

“The orthodox anthropology starts with the obvious fact that the normal state of man is the paradisiac one: it is in Paradise that man found oneself in the natural state that constitutes the paradigm of the human being.”384

The metaphysical echo of these sentences seems remote from us today. What was Alexandru Duțu’s reasoning behind his plea for a return to the sacred, for this utopic anti-modernity, we will find out soon.

384

Ibidem, p. 305.

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Religion and Modernity The separation between the Church and the state is for Marcel Gauchet385 contemporary with the liberal division of “juridical modernity”: the civil society is opposed to the state. The civil society, in the modern understanding typified by the French case, encapsulates the Church as well as any other social group under the large liberal consensus of equality before the law. The process of secularization is embedded in the creation of the modern state itself. Religions play a part only in the civil society, together with any other political, ideological or religious creeds. The state is just a legal arbiter between the different social groups competing for the symbolic legitimacy. The genuine means through which the State imposed most of its secular values and hence deprived the Church from its large influence had been, throughout the nineteenth century, the gradual expansion of the public school network in the countryside.

As evidenced by Eugen Weber in his magisterial study of the development of a national French identity through the control exerted on the collective mentality of “the judicial and school systems, the army, the church, railways, roads, and a market economy”, the idea of the nation was inserted into the minds of the rural citizenry in order to turn them into modern Frenchmen.386 To Marcel Gauchet the prime element in the modern social setting is that the liberal agenda, present in the ostensibly neutral outside overlook of the state, typifies the institutionalization of any social conflict. Within the modern consensus, different individuals, social groups, classes compete with one other in the public sphere without anyone of them winning the battle and cancelling by arbitrary domination the function represented by the very sphere itself.

What is essential is precisely the organizational scheme, within which different subjectivities fight one another without declaring any of the sides victorious to the point of eliminating the epistemological umbrella of the liberal social sphere, in which ideas and perspectives compete 385

Marcel Gauchet, Ieșirea din religie, editura Humanitas, București, 2006, pp. 33-69. Eugen Weber, Peasants Into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914, Stanford University Press, 1976. 386

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like commodities on the market. Every aspect of public attention is volatile in a democracy, but not the competition within the democratic consensus. That is describing the democratic rules in a modern society says little about the conflicts at stakes387.

A society in which old traditions and mental patterns have lost their symbolic force requires them to be sheltered from the anomy of a contradictory multitude. Here is the inflexion where the state enters the modern arena, in the guise of a neutral objective administrator. As long as the state bureaucracy ensures a climate of peaceful disputes, its task had been accomplished. The state is the invisible witness of the whole public sphere. Marcel Gauchet follows on the path of the state in modernity and notices that state administration and network of institutions develop in direct proportion to the diminishing influence of the state – undoubtedly, Marcel Gauchet has in mind the liberal state. The state gains in practical terms of coordination and administration what is loses at a symbolic level. The modern state’s neutrality and impersonality in assisting the dynamism of the social body is a consequence of the assumed rationality, and hence generality, of the natural laws and the social laws at the same time. The state does not act in its own name, but it supplements visibly the power of the invisible powers granted by Reason to the modern man. Simultaneously, the society becomes the only sphere in which all the social worries, grievances and necessities are formally canceled out. The Church relies on this social sphere to express itself and, by this calling out, gains its existence among other components of the social body.

“Yet it was not without some apprehension that Catholics assessed the new discipline. They sensed in sociology a hubris peculiar to modern man—who, having penetrated the mysteries of the physical world, possessed an impious confidence in his ability to remake human society and to dominate that world. They also could not fail to note its questionable philosophical lineage; as we have seen, the development of sociology as a separate field of study occurred along lines that, if not positively anti-Christian, were plainly secular.”388 387

Marcel Gauchet, Dezvrăjirea lumii, editura Nemira, București, 2006, pp. 308-330. Thomas E. Woods Jr., The Church confronts Modernity – Catholic Intellectuals and the Progressive Era, Columbia University Press, New York, 2006, p. 55 388

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It is a social environment where

“industrialism, economic concentration, and urban congestion have created a certain atomism among people; the small, face-to-face setting of the neighborhood has given way to an environment in which most of one’s everyday interaction occurs with strangers.”389

Therefore, if these had been the consequences of modernization in all most industrialized society, religion has gradually given up its symbolic powers to other competing ideologies or ways of thinking. Ferdinand Tönnies’ sociological dichotomy between Gemeinschaft (Community) and Gesselschaft (Society) acknowledges the function of religion of being quintessential in traditional social orders, where the Community ruled over the moral and religious life of the individual.

“Thus in Community material production was primarily for ‘use’ not ‘gain’, and was tied to communal allocation of all but the most trivial of goods and services. Art and religion were inseparable from the routine practices of domestic, vocational and civic life; and knowledge and practical skills were transmitted by inheritance, experience and example. In Society, by contrast, all personal ties were subordinate to the claims of abstract individual freedom. Both property and labour were transformed into abstract marketable ‘commodities’, their ‘value’ measured by a yet more abstract commodity in the form of money. Production migrated from the self-governing workshop into the mass production factory; art was banished into auction rooms and museums; religion – once the heart-beat of daily life – became deistic, doctrinal and dead; while knowledge and ‘advice’ was acquired by hiring an expert. In Community reason itself took the form of shared practical reason (‘common sense’ in its literal meaning), whereas in Society reason meant either private computation of profit and loss, or individual intellects grappling with ‘abstract universals’. In Community,

389

Ibidem, p. 75.

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not just work but life itself was a ‘vocation’ or ‘calling’, whilst in Society it was like a ‘business’ organized for the attainment of some hypothetical ‘happy end’.” 390

It almost goes without saying that Alexandru Duțu’s claim to a religious mindset in modern-day Romania that permeates the whole fabric of social solidarities is akin to the traditional religious-minded intellectual. Consequently, the deeply-engrained belief that the world-fromwithin, inherited from the Byzantine civilization, is a mark of the Orthodox community, where worldly affairs are relegated in the hands of an exterior administrative body such as the state, sets itself against the liberal modern Westernized conception of society, in which tradition does not hold sway over the subjects, who are free to choose their own lifestyles and set of opinions, as long as the choices are not infringing upon the liberty of others or confront the liberal legal framework. Nevertheless, Alexandru Duțu does not seem otherwise then a conservative or even, if we may be allowed, a reactionary, from a postmodern liberal usage of the word, and his works are meant to resuscitate a view of the past that diminishes the progress of the future and extolls the achievements of the past. There have been thinkers in the twentieth century that share much in common with Alexandru Duțu, with the noticeable difference that they come from a different religious confession and cultural background.

The secular view of society present in the modernization project is to Alexandru Duțu reductionist to say the least. Humankind has as much need for a divine presence in its everyday life as well as the skeptical scientific spirit. This resonates well with some of Michael Oakeshott’s ideas:

“For, as we have seen, the politics of faith and the politics of skepticism are not alternative styles of politics, but the ‘charges’ of the two poles between which modern European politics moves and has moved for near five hundred years. Each, in the abstract, may have the virtue of simplicity; but neither, as we know them, is capable of being itself a concrete style of political activity. And we have observed what the character of each would be if its 390

Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Civil Society, Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. xviii.

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partnership with the other were dissolved. Faith would simplify politics by abolishing them; and the vices of a skepticism unqualified by the pull of faith may be expected shortly to overwhelm it. It may be concluded, then, that we cannot escape from our predicament by imposing simplicity upon our politics.”391

The spirit of well-balanced reasonable thinking and the tenet of moderation in the practical affairs of life are also present in Alexandru Duțu’s works. The reason behind the principle of moderation is a care for the soul or for the confines of the world-from-within. Again, as in Michael Oakeshott’s example, who goes to great length on the topic in most of his philosophical essays, Alexandru Duțu places much emphasis on the question of a common moral denominator in the affairs of the public sphere: “The civil condition, then, is association in terms of a moral practice”.392 To the Romanian historian the present is but a continuation of the past and the revolutionary turmoil of events in history is treated as a dangerous leap into political irresponsibility, since the long process of humankind’s stable evolution makes the understanding of historical events possible. The similar idea is expressed by the British philosopher as follows:

“What is, in fact, a resultant, or even a byproduct, of conflicting purposes and interests is made to appear as the consummation of a single homogenous stream of activity triumphing over opposition and obstruction.”393

However, this is just to show a certain lineage, but there are other Anglo-Saxon thinkers to which Alexandru Duțu is intellectually closer that one might imagine. A certain consideration for tradition in general and for the social position of religion in particular, is common to both parties, irrespective of the different cultural milieus. The only challenge these thinkers have to face is the probable opposition of radical modernizers and left-inclined scholars. Conversely, this is not a way of crediting Alexandru Duțu with an intellectual affinity that turns him into 391

Michael Oakeshott, The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism, The Bath Press, Avon, 1996, p. 120. Michael Oakeshott, On Human Conduct, Clarendon Paperbacks, 1991, p. 147. 393 Michael Oakeshott, What is History and Other Essays, Imprint Academic, 2004, p. 221. 392

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someone else that the historian of mentalities he is, but historiography has its own paramount ideological groundwork which needs to be brought to the surface every once in a while394.

In one of the historical works meant to reinterpret the conservative school of thinking and to analyze modernity, the basic principles underlying the conservative project are properly depicted by Russell Kirk. The first one regards the rule of law, which has its roots in a system of justice embedded in the human nature (that does not require definition for the conservatives, since it is self-explanatory).

“True politics is the art of apprehending and applying the Justice which ought to prevail in a community of souls.”395 The very idea of a community of souls rings old-fashioned in a social system where the standardized relations between atomistic individuals are the regulating principle. The notion of soul is outdated as well: it is psychology alone that tells us everything about the soul, not religion or morality. “Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence, as opposed to the narrowing uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims of most radical systems”396 – the overarching principle of the social division of labor forces any collective activity to be subsumed to the factory organizational scheme, in which people, like commodities, are just the cogs and small components of a huge bureaucratized impersonal machine. The state itself is organized internally on the same logic and the society obeys subsequently.

The next conservative principle is an attack against the utopia of a “classless society”. “If natural distinctions are effaced among men, oligarchs fill the vacuum. Ultimate equality is the judgment of God, and equality before the courts of law, are recognized by conservatives; but equality of condition, they think, means equality in servitude and boredom.”397 The traditional arbiter is not human reason roving in its abstract foundations, but the presence of divinity extinguishes 394

For the way historiography is immersed in rhetoric and normative statements, see the classical work by Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, John Hopkins University Press, 1975. 395 Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind. From Burke to Eliot, Regnery Publishing, Inc., Washington, D.C., 2001, p. 8. 396 Ibidem. 397 Ibidem, p. 9.

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all the needs for a perfect employment of reason in all matters pertaining to the civil life. Conservatives consider also that “freedom and property are closely linked: separate property from private possession, and Leviathan becomes master of all.”398 The Leviathan might refer here to the communist states of the twentieth century where the State was the possessor of all collective property and hence the undisguised Leviathan of the Old Testament. Still, in a capitalist society, there is also a natural tendency for a few people to monopolize most of the wealth on the market. The question of economic monopoly or oligopoly, which might be the groundwork for a political oligarchy with vast amounts of power and wealth, is not taken into consideration by Russell Kirk.

However, conservatives do not wholly embrace the predicaments of capitalist complete domination: “Faith in prescription and distrust of who would reconstruct society upon abstract grounds.”399 Nevertheless, the affluent capitalist owners of corporations have control over the production of material goods. The flocks of economists who analyze and give advice are a social reality that can and does shape the public sphere and the process of decision-making. It is not clear what kind of economic system the conservatives embrace, but private property has a sacred place in the conservative mindset. At the same time, the need for constant change, which is a side effect of the capitalistic competitive tendency to innovate as to get as much a share of the new market as possible, is not something the conservatives willingly accept.

“Recognition that change may not be salutary reform: hasty innovation may be a devouring conflagration, rather than a torch of progress. Society must alter, for prudent change is the means of social preservation; but a statesmen must take Providence into his calculations, and a statesman’s chief virtue, according to Plato and Burke, is prudence.”400

398

Ibidem. Ibidem. 400 Ibidem. 399

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Some of the mental structures that have coalesced against the world of tradition are reignited by the conservatives as a positive propensity towards a prudent and realistic thinking, under the banner of what the Anglo-Saxon civilization had created in the name of “the common sense”. “Radicals believe that education, positive legislation, and alteration of environment can produce men like gods; they deny that humanity has a natural proclivity towards violence and sin.”401 The second aspect is the complete denial of the traditional heritage together with the modern obsession that scientific reason can replace completely the role of religion in man’s spiritual wellbeing.

The soul is subjected to the control of psychology or, respectively, the medical sciences. Russell Kirk sees the state as the actor able to instill into the modern society the social order which suits “an eagerness for centralization and consolidation.”402 Most of the ideas underlying Alexandru Duțu’s discourse have plenty of arguments in common with the conservative family of thinkers.

In the chapter dedicated to the father of Anglo-Saxon conservative thought, i.e. Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk draws a list of the ideological points the conservatives are set against ever since the French Revolution and its aftermath. The first questionable argument is the one on traditional religion and its various avatars. “If there is divine authority in the universe, it differs sharply in its nature from the Christian idea of God: for some radicals, it is the remote and impassive Being of the deists; for others, the misty and new-modeled God of Rousseau.”403

There are, however, the atheists and the agnostics who either deny, or refuse to accept hypothetically the presence of God in the world. God is the byproduct of humankind’s lofty imagination or rather an old-fashioned representation of the natural forces, as in the case of Auguste Comte404. From the lack of any dignified set of moral rules which govern the mundane 401

Ibidem, p. 10. Ibidem. 403 Ibidem, p. 27. 404 Auguste Comte, The Positive Philosophy, Batoche Books, Kitchener, 2000, vol. 2, pp. 249-278 and vol. 3, pp. 72115. 402

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existence follows the belief bestowed on the powers of abstract reasoning. This is another matter discredited by the conservatives as a testimony of hubris in modern times: “Abstract reason or (alternatively) idyllic imagination may be employed not merely to study, but to direct, the course of social destiny.”405

From this stems the disquieting rejection of any progressive ideology, which could only bring more menace to the condition of humankind since its premises are shrouded in errors. Hence, the conservatives regard the idea of human nature as being eternal and unchangeable. Contrary to the optimistic enlightened thinking, human nature is corrupted from the very start, as the traditional religions demonstrate as being reveled in the holy books by God alone. “Man naturally is benevolent, generous, healthy-souled, but in this age is corrupted by institutions”.406 If the social relations between classes change then the society also radically changes. What may be true for the evolution of society generally might not include the evolution of the individual. If the terms of development are set impersonally by social planners and imposed with the support of the state apparatus then, whatever its outcome, it is done against the individual freedom. It is religion and its prescripts that influence man’s personality, but its last word belongs to man’s selfhood, not to the imaginary will of society. This is how the conservatives argue against the tyranny of the majority that imposes itself against the individual in mass democracies through the power of the “mob” or the abstract “general will”.

If the feudal social order had been attacked and finally demolished by the edifice of modernity, this does not mean that human nature had gone through a radical ontological change as well. If the first periods of industrial capitalism had been hectic and painful for the peasantry and the traditional feudal classes, this does not necessarily imply that the demise of capitalism will bring forth not only new institutions, but a brand-new anthropological design. The utopian institutionalism is a modern conundrum that led to massive bloodshed in the twentieth century. Thus the conservatives argue. Man is corrupt ab origine. Therefore, tradition embodies the tried wisdom and the momentous experience of old-gone generations. Conservatism is an 405 406

Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind. From Burke to Eliot, Regnery Publishing, Inc., Washington, D.C., 2001, p. 27. Ibidem, p. 27.

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epistemological defense of traditions. The progressive thinkers think otherwise. “The traditions of mankind, for the most part, are tangled and delusory myth, from which we learn little.” 407

Consequently, the conservative thinking is partly disillusioned and partly pessimistic. The future cannot bring anything new to the world since human nature is under the sway of its sinful limits. There cannot be any perfect social order which could satisfy everybody. This world is transitory, so the prospects of a perfect stable future of humankind are delusionary at best. The enlightened modernizers design modern utopias for a would-be post-humanist world. “Mankind, capable of infinite improvement, is struggling upward toward Elysium, and should fix its gaze always upon the future.”408 The distant future is the Promised Land, after many a foes have to scar the face of the earth until the destiny of humankind is finally achieved. Conservatives are deep down anti-socialists. They frantically hate even the prospects of communism. The word “socialism” is loathed by them tout court.

“The aim of the reformer, moral and political, is emancipation – liberation from old creeds, old oaths, old establishments; the man of the future is to rejoice in pure liberty, unlimited democracy, self-governing, self-satisfying. Political power is the most efficacious instrument of reform – or, from another point of view, the demolition of existing political power.” 409

What the conservatives fight for is the intimacy of man’s heart and its needs. The world-fromwithin, which is also a pattern present in Alexandru Duțu’s works, stands for this religiouslyimbued community preserved within the confines of a Christian moral order. The political order is an appendage of the community, not the community itself.

“Revelation, reason, and an assurance beyond the senses tell us that the Author of our being exists, and that He is omniscient; and man and the state are creations of God’s beneficence. This Christian orthodoxy is the kernel of Burke’s philosophy. God’s purpose 407

Ibidem. Ibidem. 409 Ibidem, p. 28. 408

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among men is revealed through the unrolling of history. How are we to know of God’s mind and will? Through the prejudices and traditions which millennia of human experience with divine means and judgments have implanted in the mind of the species. And what is our purpose in this world? Not to indulge our appetites, but to render obedience to divine ordinance.”410

Conservatism stands also as an attack against both utilitarianism and positivism in modernity. Science cannot cure society’s misgivings and miscarriages, but can only assuage them. The principle of seeking the pleasurable side from every deed makes man more prone to gratify his/her appetites rather than improving his/her soul.

“For Burke’s lofty spirit, there could be no satisfactory suspension of judgment in these things. Either order in the cosmos is real, or all is chaos. If we are adrift in chaos, then the fragile egalitarian doctrines and emancipating programs of the revolutionary reformers have no significance; for in a vortex of chaos, only force and appetite signify.” 411

Why would the age of reason not create a perfectly neat cosmos of society at the expense of man’s freedom and soul? This troubles the conservative spirit.

“Ours is a moral order, then, and our laws are derived from immortal moral laws; the higher happiness is moral happiness, says Burke, and the cause of suffering is moral evil. Pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, disorderly appetites – these vices are the actual causes of the storms that trouble life.”412

Robert Nisbet talks in the same terms about the conservative emulation in post-WWII United States, especially as an intellectual project into the future:

410

Ibidem, p. 29. Ibidem, p. 30. 412 Ibidem. 411

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“A veritable renascence of conservative ideology was under way by the end of the fifties; it was sufficient to carry with it an interest in both Edmund Burke and Tocqueville greater perhaps than any in prior decades. Overwhelmingly the new conservatism—in resolute opposition to liberals above all other groups—followed Burke and Tocqueville in espousing decrease in centralization, pluralism over monism in government, the free market in basic economic production and distribution, intermediate social groups like family and local community and voluntary associations—all calculated to take some of the load of responsibility from big government—and, inevitably, substantial decrease in bureaucracy. The new conservatism also emphasized some of the traditional moral values which, it was plausibly argued, had gotten battered into passivity by the forces of modernism, political modernism most of all. In a word, the autonomy of social order and culture was the prized objective of the new conservatism.”413

The emphasis placed symptomatically on morality is to be traced also in most articles published by Alexandru Duțu after 1989. The same adherence to the primacy of religious commands in our everyday living shows up in the case of the conservative family of thinkers too.

“The twentieth-century conservative is concerned, first of all, for the regeneration of spirit and character - with the perennial problem of the inner order of the soul, the restoration of the ethical understanding and the religious sanction upon which any life worth living is founded.”414

413

Robert Nisbet, The Present Age. Progress and Anarchy in Modern America, Liberty Fund Indianapolis, 1988, p. 64. See also, for a further discussion of American conservatism today, Robert Nisbet, Conservatism: Dream and Reality, Transactions Publishers, 2001. 414 Ibidem, p. 472.

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Therefore, all conservatives look into the community as the best available social system415. Alexandru Duțu was also asking for the recreation of the spirit of solidarity along the lines of a closely-knit community, where the primacy of religion would face no competition.

“All history, and modern history especially, in some sense is the account of the decline of community and the ruin consequent upon that loss. In fact, the triumph of our modern state has been the most powerful actor.”416

It is the same all-encompassing state control that Alexandru Duțu saw as an inner deficiency in the birth of the Romanian nation-state in the second half of the nineteenth century. It is also the state that had gained complete control of its citizens’ livelihood during the dominance of the communist regimes in the region. The affairs of society corresponded perfectly with the affairs of the state, which goes to show how much cornered was the individual’s private life and financial autonomy. Despotism was in the hands of those who were in control of the state apparatus. The same view is expressed by Russell Kirk in his seminal study of conservative thinking in the Western world.

“Hostile toward every institution which acts as a check upon its power, the nation-state has been engaged, ever since the decline of the medieval order, in stripping away one by one the functions and prerogatives of true community – aristocracy, church, guild, and local association. What the state seeks is a tableland upon which a multitude of individuals, solitary though herded together, labor anonymously for the state’s maintenance. Universal military conscription and the and the concentration-camp are only the more recent developments of this system.”417

415

For the variety of topics addressed by conservatism today, see Roger Scruton, A Political Philosophy: Arguments for Conservatism, Bloomsbury Academic, 2007. However, for the influence of conservatism in American domestic and foreign policy after 1950, see Irvin Kristol, Neo-Conservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea, Ivan R. Dee, 1999. 416 Ibidem, p. 485. 417 Ibidem, p. 485.

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The image of the state as a new Saturn devouring his own children is not at all historically accurate, but it does go to show that sometimes it did act according to Russell Kirk’s eloquent words. The rise of the state power has been a reality ever since mid-nineteenth century, but has culminated in the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, irrespective of their ideological lineage. The importance of the state as an arbiter between various social-confined groups stood the test of time when the advent of global capitalism in the hands of the “captains” of industry was taking place after 1850.

The plight of the countryside in the newly-industrializing nations of the nineteenth century was a social fact that even the socialists considered as a predicament of capitalism. Since the Eastern outskirts of Europe were lagging behind Western and Central Europe in terms of “modernization” at the close of the century, the radical intellectual stood up as a vindicator of the oppressed multitudes. The quest for a scientific solution to the ills of society prompted the “progressive” intelligentsia of pre-modern societies to search for remedies in Western-imbued modern ideologies.

“It is therefore hardly surprising that Marx found his first foreign audience not in enlightened England, but in darkest Russia. Despite the formal differences between mentor and pupils, the two shared a common aspiration to social leveling and violent revolution. Indeed, Marx at the end of his career, when all was quiet on the western front, was so impressed by the Populists’ élan that he allowed that if the coming Russian revolution coincided with a Western one, then the peasant commune could permit the tsarist empire to leap directly into socialism without an indigenous capitalist phase—a reprise of his own scenario for Germany in 1848 and a preview of Lenin’s in 1917.”418 A modern society is not only defined by the standards of living (income) of its members, but also by the degree of industrial wealth (fixed capital) the society had acquired during generations of intense labor and productivity. This immense wealth is the constant capital of 418

Martin Malia, Russia Under Western Eyes. From the Bronze Horseman to the Lenin Mausoleum, Harvard University Press, 1999, pp. 269-270.

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the society, together with the spread of sophistication in daily affairs the historian subsumes under the “civilization” tag. The question posed by the conservative thinker is whether or not this society of consumption and affluence stands for a model. Is the modern world a good one, in the axiological sense of the traditional world? Since the religious mentality, distributed along all classes of the social hierarchy based on wealth, had stopped to be a unit of measure and had been replaced by the secular scientific mentality present in the public schools and all institutions, the conservative will have to give a negative answer. Since the society of privileges had been changed by a society where all individuals are equal before the law, the organic feudal world that lasted for centuries at a time would be torn down by the new society of capitalistic entrepreneurs and their employees. The conservative would again express his concern in regard to the prospects of humanity. The capitalistic society is technologically revolutionizing itself in every generation through the mechanism of “creative destruction”419. Men compete with one another on the market as commodities420. Their inner value as future employees is expressed by the monthly wage. This is the capitalistic mindset in the global market ever since the 1850 onwards. The communitarian Weltanschauung cannot prevail under these standardized impersonal circumstances. Consumption turns into the only action that the society does irrespective of the social differences expressed through educational or economic background. The impersonal forces of the market are at work against the stable social order of the countryside, which requires to be dismantled for the urban cores to grow and radically alter the demographics of the countryside. The same process troubled the geographical realities of Western Europe in the nineteenth century and even more so in North America. Central Europe would industrialize at a 419

Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, London, Routledge, 1994, pp. 82-83: “Capitalism [...] is by nature a form or method of economic change and not only never is but never can be stationary. [...] The fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from the new consumers’ goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates. [...] The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation [...] that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in.” 420 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. I, Penguin Classics, 1990, pp. 163-178.

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face pace in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The traditional lifestyle had been ever since in dire straits, if it indeed managed to survive. Eastern Europe had been spared of the ominous surge of industrialization in the nineteenth century, but the pressures of the next century would make the region a laboratory of forced industrialization. The "modern” society was to be brought about by the “civilizing” state, not more different than what had taken place all along the previous century. The statesmen and the state apparatus had been directing the leverage in one or another direction, as it considered best in its modernizing business. Within this inorganic growth of the economy one could trace the disruptive unbalanced social unrest in which the Romanian society, for instance, will find itself into at the end of the twentieth century. The traditional lifestyle would not accept the pressures of the state, but will not remain the same either: a feeling of “failed” modernity will constitute the general mental framework. As Angela Harre states in her conceptual study regarding the mental strictures involved in the concept of “progress”: “the progressive Romanian thinking had developed along the spiral of the radicalization of state intervention, which had finalized with the Soviet-type planned economy, only to be surpassed by the socio-economic changes in the period 1989-1990. A characteristic of the Romanian conceptual theorizing had been until then the debate and the critique of the idea of an inevitable and mandatory progress. Given the economic backwardness in Romania, the orientation towards the future was accompanied by the threat that the state’s independence might be questioned if it did not keep the pace with the rhythm of industrialization of Western Europe. Because of this threat, progress became a concept of planning. At the beginning of the 1930’s, the Great Depression had offered the ideal occasion for a critique of the capitalist transformations and even of capitalism as an economic project. The path of Western development was explicitly seen as a dead-end,

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instead of which there needed to be discovered more suitable alternatives for the Romanian realities.”421 Long after 1900, Romania was still an agrarian state, where most of the population lived in the traditional communities of their forefathers. The age of the capitalist order flourishing in a modern industrialized Romania was still an aspiration left for the distant future. The level of urban development and the material state of most of the population could be attributable to pre-modernity. A locally-bred bourgeoisie was still in its infancy, if we eliminate the capital city and the few scattered major Romanian cities, where the institutions of the state protected its own bourgeoisie of public functionaries. The state apparatus controlled and ruled over the process of modernization: the first class to modernize on Western patters had been the local bureaucracy, which formed its own closed world secluded from the rural population. “Already during the second half of the nineteenth century Romanian economists typically questioned the inevitability of and believed in the human ability to plan the future. At the latest since the Great Depression of the 1930s they criticized the reality as well as the project of capitalist transformation, too. Thus, the years 1945 or 1948 respectively are not seen as a break in Romanian economic thinking, but as a further step in a very specific line of reasoning, which could be broken as late as with the breakdown of communism in 1989/1990.”422 Therefore, Alexandru Duțu’s reaction in the spirit of a conservative creed and his attempts to draw the history of mentalities in the last decades of the eighteenth century and the first in the nineteenth century in favor of the organically embedded elements in the local culture that have hybridized with a modernization process totally cast aside from the Romanian society in the nineteenth century. Taking a standpoint in one of the articles after 1989, Alexandru Duțu traces back the entire issues of modernity, tradition and the mentalities present in the Romanian society:

421

Victor Neumann, Armin Heinen (editori), Istoria României prin concepte, editura Polirom, Iași, 2010, pp. 172199. 422 Ibidem, p. 199.

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“In almost all the south-eastern European countries, the cultural tradition had been profoundly reconsidered in the age of modernization: the end of the Old Regime, with all its paraphernalia of abuses, stupidities and coarseness, had awoken a reaction that we, the people of today, are more capable of comprehending than our forefathers, because we are witnessing the end of a regime at least as aggressive and stupid as the Absolutist regime. The criticism had often been radical and the scholars from all the south-eastern countries have gone beyond the causes of the negative phenomena and have accused even the Church […], either of passivity or incapacity to resist the political pressure or even collaborating with the former regime. Going even further, the critics of the Old Regime have suggested abandoning the old structures and have also included religion within this category. Hence, the existence of the currents which are confronting to this very day in this part of Europe: the will to reconsider tradition and to give it a new meaning, on the one hand, and , which takes pathetic forms, since it is more based on emotions rather than ideas and which, on the other hand, supports the abandonment of tradition. The first current is founded on the continuity of thinking and recognizing the role of the Church in the life of the nation, the second is a predominantly laic current which relegates the religious life into the private sphere, refusing the implication of religion in the public sphere. The first current stems from the Byzantine tradition, while the second from the example of . Consequently, the current idea for us that you are either patriotic or European.”423 Alexandru Duțu’s own political thinking is amorphous and heteroclite: on the one hand he considered the path to modernity expressed by the various countries of Western Europe as being a vast resource of ideas in regard to a successful example of democratic and economic society that the European East could borrow from, on the other hand he accused the West as being spiritually narrow-minded in its disregard of tradition and religion and too much obsessed with the material wellbeing.

423

Alexandru Duțu, Lumea dinăuntru și lumea din afară, editura Universității din București, 2009, p. 178.

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The religious perspective on life does not only influence the relation to traditions of young generations, but it is also the standpoint from which the road to modernity in the Romanian principalities had started from. However, it happened more often that the Orthodox tradition had been captured by the Romanian patriotic zeal and had melted into the fabric of the mythological nation-state that would dominate the modernization process after 1866. Being a patriot meant giving more credit to the composite ideological mishmash of religion and the nation as embodiments of eternal forces in history, which would invest far-right local movements with a legitimacy of their own in the interwar period. Being a European meant adopting the secular mindset of the West and embracing a radical liberalism of French revolutionary descent. The only unaddressed question in the plot of the Romanian modernization process was the place occupied by the economic system and the subsequent social structure it ensues. Capitalism is a subject almost never asked by Alexandru Duțu. What would the benefits of industrialism do to the local mentalities? The village would naturally have to be sacrificed for the urban comfort and the modern agglomeration of atomized individuals. The conservative relinquishes the issues of material necessities and how the social structure incorporates the economic conditions to suppress the predominance of these necessities. The moral order demanded by the Christian conservative from God’s subjects does not entirely correspond to the liberal mentality of a secular citizenry. “The great, overwhelming impact of the West on other regions as it came into contact with them, and on Eastern Europe in particular, was political. Western commerce may have been economically constructive and destructive, but Western political intervention always posed a deadly threat to local elites. They had three avenues they could take in response: reform to create polities strong enough to fight back; eschew reform and engage in a hopeless fight to the death as Western pressures increased; or accept a limited degree of sovereignty in return for the protection of Western powers. Competitive state-building efforts had begun in Western Europe in the late Middle Ages, had accelerated in the age of absolutism, and had intensified during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. The process then

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continued and only culminated in Europe with the dreadful world wars of the twentieth century. (…) But later, politics, the effort to build strong state structures, became the basis of economic growth. Political ambitions and ideals have been limited by what particular economies could bear, but economic limitations have set the boundaries for political action, not vice versa.”424 It is now clear that the national state of Romania after 1866 was taking the first vista towards modernity: a general spirit of reformation was present in the higher social echelons. Despite this, the traditional lifestyle continued to linger on in the countryside, untarnished by any glimpse of modern reforms. The agrarian commercial economy was not the industrialized Western model that would later on expand to most corners of the world. It seems that the economic refusal of modernity is a reality that had survived in Eastern Europe long into the twentieth century. Therefore, a society which refuses to change can and usually takes a positive view of religion. Alexandru Duțu fostered a religiously-minded mentality and defended most core principals of the conservative thinking, as we have demonstrated, in a largely economically backward society where the place of tradition had been for centuries not only highly secured, but socially rewarding. It is not just by looking at the past that one understands the survival of some mental structures in the contemporary society, but it also the past that might still have a strong word to say about the world as it stands. Alexandru Duțu’s vision of modernity is only apparently defensive: the religious mentality in a modern secular setting does not always fit in a liberal social body. The question is whether one could wholeheartedly embrace the conservative credo in a largely unreformed and conservative society as well.

424

Daniel Chirot (editor), The Origins of Backwardness in Eastern Europe: economics and politics from the Middle Ages until the early twentieth century, University of California Press, 1991, p. 11

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Conclusions Questions of method are the kernel of any scientific paper. In our current enterprise, the task was not set to write down a biography of Alexandru Duțu or to challenge the assumptions of some of his works, which would be rather the object of a historian steeped in the fascinating realm of historiography, not of a political scientist. However, Alexandru Duțu’s works and main ideas have been hopefully thoroughly addressed all throughout the preceding pages. What we have striven to achieve in our study had been to pinpoint a number of concepts and to track down their history as they unfold in the academic works of Alexandru Duțu. At the same time, our quest had not only been to identify the exact places where Alexandru Duțu’s conceptual kit had improved, developed or just altered in the course of his long-life studies, but also to come to understand how these concepts, separated from Alexandru Duțu’s oeuvre, have their own beguiling intricate history. Reinhart Koselleck’s method of Begriffsgeschichte or conceptual history had been a source of inspiration while writing on Alexandru Duțu’s work. The basic tenet of the German historian’s methodology had been to decipher the change in the use of concepts or in their meanings between the classical world of Europe and the modern world emerging at the same time as the Industrial Revolution was surging in the European landscape or what Koselleck called “the dissolution of the old world and the emergence of the new in terms of the historical-conceptual comprehension of this process.”425 Whenever a concept had started being more widely used, conceptual history would come to the rescue by analyzing both the layers of meaning embedded in the concepts and its frequency in official papers or in philosophical works. Basically, the epistemological enquires of the Begriffsgeschichte school are reduced to a finite, but exhaustive number of questions:

“Is the concept in common use? Is its meaning disputed? What is the social range of its usage? In what contexts does the term appear? Is the term articulated in terms of a concept with which it is paired, either in a complementary or adversary sense? Who uses the term, 425

Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time, Columbia University Press, 2004, p. xiv.

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for what purpose, and to address whom? How long has it been in social use? What is the valency of the term within the structure of social and political vocabulary? With what terms does it overlap, and does it converge with other terms over time?” 426

In a nutshell, the kind of experience opened up by the emergence of modernity triggered a set of conceptual changes that express, in a forthcoming objective way, the changes of consciousness experienced by individuals at the level of the concepts they employ. Notwithstanding this enquiry are also the stable unchallenged elements within the broad conceptual shifts that have occurred since the beginning of modernity. “The town was the “frontier,” a new and dynamic world where people felt they could break their ties with the past, where people hoped they would find opportunities for economic and social advancement, and where there would be ample reward for initiative, daring, and hard work.”427

However, by the time the Western world was on its modernizing track, the Eastern lands were still largely rural and the modern view was still in its infancy even at the level of the elites. Tradition had only slowly begun to be challenged. The apparently contradictory overlapping of synchronous meanings in a diachronous setting is what constitutes the merits of Begriffsgeschichte school428. The epistemological clash, if one may be allowed to call it as such, between pre-modernity and modernity has hindered the belief that there is a truth outside history. The political ideologies that have been one-sided in the direction of progress and modernity have fiercely denied any reason for which traditions should continue to exist in a modernizing, if not yet modern, setting. Reinhart Koselleck looks coolheadedly at all the prospects engrained in modern words and their daily use:

426

Ibidem. Carlo M. Cipolla, Before the Industrial Revolution, Routledge London, 2005, p. 92. 428 For the subject of history and philosophical writing, see Richard Rorty, Jerome G. Schneewind, Quentin Skinner (editors), Philosophy in History: Essays in the Historiography of Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, 1984 and J. G. A. Pocock, Politics, Language, and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History, University of Chicago Press, 1989. 427

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“Enlightenment rationalism raised the prospect of unending progress and human improvement, and this vision was transformed into a future, realizable utopia through its articulation in the political programs of the French, and later, European revolutions. These broke decisively with the closed and cyclical structure of the eschatological world view in which predictions of the coming End of the World and the Final Judgment set the limit to human ambition and hope; instead, society was now perceived as accelerating toward an unknown and unknowable future, but within which was contained a hope of the desired utopian fulfillment. Utopias and the hopes embodied in them in turn became potential guarantees of their own fulfillment, laying the basis for the transformation of modern conflict into civil war. Because the fronts of political conflict are now based upon ideological differences, conflict becomes endemic, self-generating, and, in principle, endless. In one sense, then, we exist in a modern world traversed by such conflicts, in which permanent civil war exists on a world scale; and which, while it is directly related to the aspirations of Enlightenment rationalism, is a world quite different from the one anticipated. The modern world represents a future which once existed, is now realized, and is perpetually in danger of outrunning the power of its inhabitants to control its course.”429

A new history of discourse unleashes its power in the works of Reinhart Koselleck. The relationships of past and present events at the level of concepts expose the steps taken by the mind, through language, to accommodate to the pressures and inner tensions of modernity.

“Without common concepts there is no society, and above all, no political field of action. Conversely, our concepts are founded in sociopolitical systems that are far more complex than would be indicated by treating them simply as linguistic communities organized around specific key concepts. A “society” and its “concepts” exist in a relation of tension which is also characteristic of its academic historical disciplines.”430

429

Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time, Columbia University Press, 2004, pp. xviiixix. 430 Ibidem, p. 76.

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Koselleck’s attempt is not meant to relativize the study of concepts so as to make them the heirs of man’s whims and folly, but to delineate what is standing and what does expose itself to changes when concepts are used. What Koselleck manages to scientifically prove is that the meaning of words is both flexible and stationary, especially more flexible in relation to the modernization process. It was with this perspective in mind that we approached Alexandru Duțu’s works in a similar fashion: to identify both the way some fundamental concepts acquire and lose meanings at the same time during the period 1800-1848 in the Romanian Principalities and what the tradition had been before the modernizers built an image of it in accordance with the principles of Enlightenment borrowed from their Western counterparts. This method in used by Alexandru Duțu only incidentally, just to highlight how mentalities affect the structure of the language, depicted as a signal of the political and social changes going on at the surface of words and vocabulary. “The sociohistorical relevance of the results increases precisely because attention is directed in a rigorously diachronic manner to the persistence or change of a concept. To what extent has the intentional substance of one and the same word remained the same? Has it changed with the passage of time, a historical transformation having reconstructed the sense of the concept? The persistence and validity of a social or political concept and its corresponding structure can only be appreciated diachronically. The fact that a word has remained in constant use is not in itself sufficient indication of stability in its substantial meaning. Thus, the standard term Bürger is devoid of meaning without an investigation of the conceptual change undergone by the expression “Bürger”: from (Stadt-)Bürger (burgher) around 1700 via (Staats-)Bürger (citizen) around 1800 to Bürger (bourgeois) as a nonproletarian around 1900, sketching this out in a rough-and-ready manner.”431

Concepts are not exposed as innocent or value-free tools by Reinhart Koselleck, but rather as implements invested with symbolic powers that lead to reforms, revolutions, the unsettling of

431

Ibidem, p. 82.

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the status quo and the inventions of a civil society, with its own conceptual limits that defines the atmosphere of the age:

“The semantic struggle for the definition of political or social position, defending or occupying these positions by deploying a given definition, is a struggle that belongs to all those times of crisis of which we have learned through written sources. Since the French Revolution, this struggle has become more acute and has undergone a structural shift; concepts no longer serve merely to define given states of affairs, but reach into the future. Concepts of the future became increasingly new-minted; positions that were to be secured had first to be formulated linguistically before it was possible to enter or permanently occupy them. The experiential substance of many concepts was thus reduced, while their claim to realization increased in proportion. Actual, substantial experience and the space of expectation coincide less and less. It is here that the coining of numerous “isms” belongs, serving as collective and motivating concepts capable of reordering and mobilizing anew the masses robbed of their place in the old order of estates. The application of such expressions reached, as today, from slogan to scientifically defined concept. One needs only to think of “conservatism,” “liberalism,” or “socialism.”432

The German historian takes words such as “Stand, class, estate owner, owner, the economic, inhabitant, and citizen” and tells the story of their evolution “in terms of their contemporary conceptual boundaries, and the self-understanding on the part of past speakers and writers of their own language-use.”433 Hence, his method is broader and more specific at the same time.

“Begriffsgeschichte is therefore initially a specialized method for source criticism, taking

note as it does of the utilization of terminology relevant to social and political elements, and directing itself in particular to the analysis of central expressions having social or political content.”434 432

Ibidem, p. 80. Idem. 434 Ibidem, see also Reinhart Koselleck, Conceptele și istoriile lor, editura Art, București, 2009, pp. 7-93. 433

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The disequilibrium of present and past accounts expressed through the concept, as well as its ever unbalanced relation with other ideologically laden concepts, constitutes the interlocking of synchronicity and diachrony in the steady evolution of a given concept.

“Insofar as concepts, during this second phase of investigation, are detached from their situational context, and their meanings ordered first according to the sequence of time and then secondly with respect to each other, the individual historical analyses of concepts constitute themselves as a history of the concept.”435

Furthermore, what makes Reinhart Koselleck’s method appealing is that by giving up any pretense of writing a meta-narrative in the guise of real history, he acknowledges the potential of a research limited in scope but objective in its deepness of subject. By understanding not the real meaning of ideologically-laden concepts, but their subsequent meanings in various historical periods, the study of history is following a refreshing perspective on aspects and realities that have been concealed from public scrutiny.

“In the face of the retreat of the great explicative models, a first, strong temptation was to return to the archives and to the raw document that registers the upwelling of singular instances of speech, which are always richer and more complex than what the historian has to say about them.”436

Reinhart Koselleck had engaged in reviewing the “singular instances” and testifies that they are not singular, but rather expressions of endogenous mental patterns conflicting exogenous forces that make way for changes of framework, within social and individual instances.

435

Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time, Columbia University Press, 2004, p. 82. Roger Chartier, On the Edge of the Cliff: History, Language and Practices, The John Hopkins University Press, 1996, p. 3 436

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“Our contemporary concept of history, together with its numerous zones of meaning, which in part are mutually exclusive, was first constituted toward the end of the eighteenth century. It is an outcome of the lengthy theoretical reflections of the Enlightenment. Formerly there had existed, for instance, the history that God had set in motion with humanity. But there was no history for which humanity might have been the subject or which could be thought of as its own subject. Previously, histories had existed in the plural—all sorts of histories had occurred and might be used as exempla in teachings on ethics and religion, and in law and philosophy. Indeed, history (die Geschichte) as an expression was plural.”437

There has already been registered an increase in the interest for a conceptual history directed at explaining the mentalities at work in the specific case of the Romanian history438, inspired from the method devised by Reinhart Koselleck. Victor Neumann and Armin Heinen have assembled together a volume of studies by various scholars directed on explaining keyconcepts which underlie the mental structure behind the local history. A list of concepts is provided in the summary section of the book: “politics, political person, democracy, Europe, liberalism, constitution, property, progress, neam (the Romanian word for kinship), nation, national character, national specificity, homeland, patriotism, education, totalitarianism, democracy, democratic, democratization, transition, censorship, manipulation, freedom of expression.”439

As one could easily notice, most concepts that are relevant for the Romanian case refer to the elite’s project of building a national identity in the last half of the nineteenth century, a project that would continue further on in the first decades of the twentieth. The editors expressed intention had been to reinforce the utility of the abovementioned key-concepts in the context of the modernization process.

437

Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time, Columbia University Press, 2004, p. 194. Victor Neumann, Armin Heinen (editors), Istoria României prin concepte, editura Polirom, Iași, 2010. 439 Ibidem, p. 509. 438

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“They [the concepts] also offer alternative perspectives on the Romanian culture through the relationship between the elite and society and novel reflections on the issues that bring out the delayed and the unfinished modernization process within the society and the state.”440

In the background of any value laden concept there is the cultural identity that speaks for itself in molding the mental patterns of a nation as part of a wider civilization. The Romanian case makes no exception to this all-pervading tendency. At this point, one may wholly embrace the culturally-oriented interpretation of the modernization process and assume that every traditional culture absorbs some features of the modernizing Western prototype and shuffles others in particular forms. As long as the cultural ties do not break out, the modernization process is an open-ended experiment. The cultural divide gives credence to the Western model of modernization:

“That at least is the way in which non-Westerners see the new world, and there is a significant element of truth in their view. Differences in power and struggles for military, economic and institutional power are thus one source of conflict between the West and other civilizations. Differences in culture, that is basic values and beliefs, are a second source of conflict. V. S. Naipaul has argued that Western civilization is the “universal civilization” that “fits all men.” At a superficial level much of Western culture has indeed permeated the rest of the world. At a more basic level, however, Western concepts differ fundamentally from those prevalent in other civilizations. Western ideas of individualism, liberalism, constitutionalism, human rights, equality, liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets, the separation of church and state, often have little resonance in Islamic, Confucian, Japanese, Hindu, Buddhist or Orthodox cultures. Western efforts to propagate such ideas produce instead a reaction against “human rights imperialism” and a reaffirmation of indigenous values, as can be seen in the support for religious fundamentalism by the younger generation in non-Western cultures. The very notion that 440

Idem.

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there could be a “universal civilization” is a Western idea, directly at odds with the particularism of most Asian societies and their emphasis on what distinguishes one people from another. […] In the political realm, of course, these differences are most manifest in the efforts of the United States and other Western powers to induce other peoples to adopt Western ideas concerning democracy and human rights. Modern democratic government originated in the West. When it has developed in non-Western societies it has usually been the product of Western colonialism or imposition.”441

The cultural divide between the Western model and the socio-political concepts, inspired by the Westernization process itself that coincides to the spread of modernity, is visible in the way the Romanian intellectual and political elites had internalized the Western European civilization as well. Though, we might add here, ascribing normative value to the Western civilizational patterns creates both a feeling of cultural inferiority and civilizational provincialism. Alexandru Duțu had argued against a single normative European framework, of Western inspiration only. The complexity of the European identity refers also to the territories east to the river Elbe and involves the legacy of the Orthodox traditions, not only the legacy of the Protestant North and Catholic South. A critical, left-inspired perspective on the civilizational task of Western Europe had developed as well, in which the national identity is less important in a system governed by an unrestricted global free market:

“Now, it is said that the project of constructing an autocentric national economy has become anachronistic since the nation-state is itself in the process of a weakening even in the centers. It would then be necessary to demonstrate that the societies of the emerging countries are on the way to becoming more like those of the already existing centers, within the overall prospect of a uniform capitalist world supposedly in formation.” 442

441

Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilization and the Remaking of the World Order, Simon & Schuster, 1996, pp. 42-43. 442 Samir Amin, Eurocentrism. Modernity, Religion, and Democracy. A Critique of Eurocentrism and Culturalism, Monthly Review Press, 2010, p. 277.

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But this is to go beyond the nineteenth century nation-building process, coinciding with the state design, to which most concepts relevant in the works of Alexandru Duțu in his cultural analysis converge. The current study has explicitly set to explain two consequences that result from Alexandru Duțu’s scholarship. Let’s begin with the first one.

At a conceptual level, Alexandru Duțu sets to address multiple inquires pertaining to the cultural characteristics of the Romanian Principalities before the 1800s. His books illustrate the richness and variety of the scriptural and oral, religious and folkloric traits that marked the post-Byzantine civilization of Eastern Europe. Alexandru Duțu demolishes both the myths of cultural bareness or backwardness of an Orientalized European East and the supposedly lack of interconnectedness to the Western and Central European influences. In fact, before the surge of the scientifically revolutionary nineteenth century, Europe was a multifaceted continent that expressed a single identity under the banner of Christianity, not to mention here the variety of the religious doctrines themselves. The concept of nationhood along ethnic lines and nationality as a common denominator of any state’s citizens were in the making and were just about to pierce through the mainstream discourse all across continental Europe. When the process of modernization had been initiated in the Eastern hinterland in the first decades of the nineteenth century, the cultural patterns of the region were still in use. In the words of Martin Malia when discussing the issue of a single European cultural project wherein every small ethnic ethos could find its place:

“During the three hundred fifty years since the failure of the Habsburgs’ aspirations to universal empire in the sixteenth century, Europe had lived under a multistate system of international relations, eventually designated as the concert of Europe and held to be founded on a balance of power. This order, though challenged successively by Louis XIV, Napoleon, and Wilhelmian Germany, nonetheless invariably reemerged.”443

443

Martin Malia, Russia Under Western Eyes. From the Bronze Horseman to the Lenin Mausoleum, Harvard University Press, 1999, p. 4.

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Alexandru Duțu’s sees the romantic revolutionary zeal of the Romanian boyars after 1820 as a political program meant to create a nation-state without considering the organic cultural legacy and deeply engrained mentalities of the common people and thus hindering the possible beneficial effects of the top-down modernization scheme by recklessly pursuing a modernization plot bereft of genuine positive prospects.

Henceforth, the second argument of Alexandru Duțu’s gains ground. The readiness with which the public discourse of the elites had accepted Western models goes both against the bedrock of the modernization model and the genuine political traditions of the populace. In the first place, by implementing reforms through the state apparatus, the elites have not questioned their role in the new society. The Western modernization process was embedded organically in the society per se. A modern society is secular and governed by capitalistic interests and, within the process, capitalistic mentalities as well. The middle classes are its foundations. Romania was lagging behind economically and the modernization process did not amend the social backwardness in its first stages. As a side effect, the state acquired a new position and immense power in the Romanian society.

In terms of the cultural consequences, Alexandru Duțu highlights the revolutionary fervor with which never-before-seen political concepts that expressed no connection to the social realities of the region have emerged through an acculturation occurrence. Consequently, the oral and scriptural traditions of the people had been put under pressure from the ruling elites by enforcing a Western mainly French-inspired ideology in the midst of an old world, endowed with traditions of its own. These past traditions have not been swiped away, but they have never been addressed properly while being sent into oblivion by the reformers. At the same time, Alexandru Duțu emphasizes the civilization model of the Romanian society before the advent of modernity: the religious and the folkloric layers had been interlocked through centuries, resulting in the dichotomy of the world-from-within and the-outside-world. The cultural pattern is explored by Alexandru Duțu in all his works, especially from a comparative perspective. The moral practices, if one may be allowed to utilize this collocation, of the top214

layer segment of the Romanian elite were rationalized according to Western patterns, but the language spoken by the common people reverted to the traditional framework of inherited customs and mental habits. It is this language that Michael Oakeshott had in mind when we wrote the following lines:

“The conditions which compose a moral practice are not theorems or precepts about human conduct, not do they constitute anything so specific as a ‘shared system of values’; they compose a vernacular language of colloquial intercourse. This language is not a vocabulary of abstract nouns denoting recognized bona of human conduct in terms of which actions and utterances may be judged, approved or disapproved. Nor is it a language spoken on some occasions (e.g. when explicit moral ‘valuations’ are being discussed) and not on others; it is spoken, well or ill, on every occasion of human intercourse. Like any other language, it is an instrument of self-disclosure used by agents in diagnosing their situations and in choosing their responses; and it is a language of self-enactment which permits those who can use it to understand themselves and one another, to disclose to one another their complex individualities, and to explore relationships far more varied and interesting than those it has a name for or those which a commonplace acceptance of socalled ‘moral values’ would allow.”444

Borrowing traits of the methodology from the French historian Roger Chartier, Alexandru Duțu had striven to unlock the mysteries behind the concepts and the mentalities that are pinned to in the worldly speech and scriptural records of the Romanian elites and common people in the timespan separating the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. What Alexandru Duțu had gone on arguing in his books is that the rise and the spread of modernity in traditional societies, which have been concealed from the main trade lines of world commerce for the whole premodern history, had been a lopsided victory over the cultural design of entire peoples, Eastern Europe being one among many areas where the overshadowing influence of the Western European civilization had been acutely felt. The historical consciousness of the Eastern parts of 444

Michael Oakeshott, On Human Conduct, Clarendon Paperbacks, 1991, p. 63.

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Europe, including the particular Romanian case, had been fomented by the local elites within the frame-work of self-colonization. It should be stressed here that the urban strata and the autonomy granted by the feudal lords through charters and royal statutes to the city life had scarcely existed across Eastern Europe, where the thrifty urban commerce had not gained a predominant social position over the other strata of society long into the nineteenth century.

“These developments tool the form of the rise of a privileged class of burghers who, cutting themselves adrift from production, began to engage exclusively in wholesale trade. Here, in a wider and a widening market, lay rich opportunities of gain that far outshone the modest livelihood that a craftsman who worked with his hands and retailed his wares in the local market could ever have hoped to win.”445

To go back to the topic discussed before, the notion of self-colonization refers specifically to the self-awareness traditional societies gained through the elites in power by comparisons in the standards of living between the non-Western and Western societies, which by the latter’s perceived excellence triggers a sense of backwardness and the necessity of revolutionary changes in the former’s political and economic leadership. A new collective identity is being erected from scratch:

“This (collective) identity is vulnerable of nonrecognition, at first on the part of the members of the dominant society, but later there has developed a public scene, on which people see themselves as standing, on which they see themselves as rated, on which rating matters to them. This world scene is dominated of relatively advance, even to the point of having to discover periodic neologisms in order to euphemize the distinction… backward, underdeveloped, developing… The backdrop of modern nationalism, that there is something to be caught with, each society in its own way, is inscribed in this common language, which in turn, animates the world public sphere.”446 445

Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism, London Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1950, p. 86. Charles Taylor, “Nationalism and Modernity”, The Morality of Nationalism, ed. R. McKim, J. McMahan, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1997, p. 38–50. 446

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History is to Alexandru Duțu a matter of contemplating what had been standing still in a whirlpool of events that seem to engulf and subvert everything around. The act of contemplation as a modus vivendi was a matter of prime importance in traditional societies, irrespective of the religious rites attributed to contemplation. Moreover, the modern world has erased the fine line between the realm of pure contemplation in search for perennial attributes of moral significance and the quest of possessions under the sway of human action that sparks off the belief in radical secular historical projects.

“While it is obvious that our historical consciousness would never have been possible without the rise of the secular realm to a new dignity, it was not so obvious that the historical process would eventually be called upon to bestow the necessary new meaning and significance upon men's deeds and sufferings on earth. And indeed, at the beginning of the modem age everything pointed to an elevation of political action and political life, and the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, so rich in new political philosophies, were still quite unaware of any special emphasis on history as such. Their concern, on the contrary, was to get rid of the past rather than to rehabilitate the historical process. (…) The conviction of the modem age that man can know only that which he himself has made seems to be in accordance with a glorification of action rather than with the basically contemplative attitude of the historian and of historical consciousness in general.”447

It was a question of looking for the chasm separating the old order and the modern times in Alexandru Duțu’s work on mentalities and historiography. Furthermore, the last part of our concluding remarks will try to revise the content of each section of our research study by eliciting both the contribution of Alexandru Duțu’s in the Romanian social sciences and, fortunately, our original contribution to the overall subject as well.

447

The Portable Hannah Arendt, Penguin Classics, 2003, p. 300.

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*** In the beginning of our paper, we set out the theoretical framework that underlies the conceptual analysis that follows next. It discusses the role of Alexandru Duțu’s education in his formative years, as well as the main intellectual lines of thinking that have invested the historian’s subject with deep meaning by their overt influence. Consequently, this section had been also devised as situated between two historical records: the old order of pre-communist Romania from which Alexandru Duțu had gained his cultural background and the new communist order that ruled out any possibility of continuing what had been genuine in the intellectual milieu of the interwar generation. The overlapping of two biographies within Alexandru Duțu witnesses the ambivalence of an entire age: on the one hand, the religious scholar settled in his world-from-within, on the other hand, the collaborator who represents the communist nationalistic downturn after 1970 in academic exchanges with the Western world. I argue that the refusal of sacrificing the world-from-within for the outside-world after 1989 does not often correspond to the points of view adopted before the fall of the Former Regime. As far back as the historical methodology in the field of comparative literature is concerned, the history of ideas and the genealogy of mentalities identified by Alexandru Duțu had been put together into a coherent whole, whereas the Romanian historian had balanced between an oral and scriptural post-Byzantium tradition that was slightly exposed to Western values and ideas and the explosive romantic concoction of liberalism and progressive doctrines of Western inspiration after the 1800s. The two cultural layers would bring about an organic modernization process that would not call off the inherent cultural antagonisms between the Western and local patterns.448

I will then go on to develop these ideas into a systematic outlining of the political contradiction within the Romanian historiography as outlined by Alexandru Duțu. The Romanian nationalistic ethos had embraced the cause of the nation, but, as a direct side effect, it had to invent a brand new nation that suited the revolutionary passions of 1848 in the creation of a functioning sovereign national state. The founding fathers of the modern Romanian nation state had carved 448

For a sociological portrayal of the historical period, see Constanța Vintilă-Ghițulescu, Evgheniți, ciocoi, mojici. Despre obrazele primei modernități românești (1750-1860), editura Humanitas, București, 2013.

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out from the ‘’official’’ history of the nation the civilizational Byzantium landmarks, without taking too much into consideration the mental organization of society before the advent of modernity in the Eastern outskirts. Alexandru Duțu traces the political concepts’ history as being based on social ties that share part of the local realities in the region, but twisted under the passion for change and radical reforms as to keep pace to the great transformation, to use Karl Polany’s suitable expression, on the other side of the continent.

Consequently, the next part of the study will deal in depth with the question of Europe as a symbolic order of reference for the Romanian elites after 1830. Alexandru Duțu argues for an inter-connected patchwork of different European cultures, that share, replicate and distort the European identity as the embodiment of the Otherness out of which the modern self-identity emanates. Romania is no exception to the rule, but rather a blatant confirmation. As we proceed onwards, we also address Alexandru Duțu’s political and cultural representation of Europe from Eastern Europe to Western Europe and vice versa, stressing some of the cultural stereotypes that still shape the public discourse and the academic jargon. The clash of the two sides of Europe – which defines the Romanian self-identity among the elites – is mainly cultural and only partially economic in the nineteenth century and a long time span afterwards. Another section of our work concentrates on a thorough examination of the main academic debates concerning the modernization process in Romania after 1866, hinting at various points in our demonstration to the prodigious number of sources that have studied the topic in the West as well. The final part of chapter three expressly concentrates on highlighting the differences and similarities of Alexandru Duțu’s approach in regard to the main schools of thinking that have addressed the issues before.

Up to this point, our conclusion is that the Romanian historian had explicitly employed a historical methodology which has been much preoccupied with long-lasting cultural patterns in the process of modernization and had generally sidestepped the role of modern sociological tools that focus exclusively on economic and social matters. Alexandru Duțu’s assessment is

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deeply indebted to a view of history wherein religion, traditional customs and habits, cultural specificities induce the type of political and economic modernity a country engages in.

As we proceed, in the next section of our study I have approached the intricate history of mentalities at work in the Romanian lands at the crossroads of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This perspective will allow Alexandru Duțu enough liberty to span across the region of Eastern Europe in search of cultural similitudes and common heritages long before the 1800s. The clash of cultural traditions had left its marked imprint on the linguistic diversity of the area. Nevertheless, Alexandru Duțu distinguishes between a clear-cut hierarchical social order in Western and Central Europe, where the commands of the feudal society had been organically internalized along the line of the city-large estate-village, and an Eastern equivalent, where both the political elite, the clergy and the common folk were interspersed in such a fashion that there had been less cultural discrepancies between them as in the particular case of their Western counterparts. Alexandru Duțu identifies this cultural characteristic as embodied in the written accounts of the period that indirectly highlight the scriptural and oral mindsets coalescing into a unified social reality. This society showed its gratitude to its Byzantine legacy. Alexandru Duțu develops a conceptual history where different daily-used terms of the past ages are trademarks of a forlorn mentality.

Finally, as we approach the end of our paper, Alexandru Duțu acquires enough scholarly consistency as to be turned into a subject of analysis in matters pertaining to his methodological output. Notwithstanding the diversity of influences that come together in Alexandru Duțu’s cultural background, we manage to trace some recurrent themes within the historian’s work: the role of religious values that offer the blueprint of a distinctive fully-fledged culture and the role ascribed to the community as a spiritual solidarity that stretches beyond the confines of practical endeavors into the realm of religious spirituality. We questioned Alexandru Duțu’s methodology and, after delving into the jungle of political theory, we have reached the conclusion that the Romanian historian belonged to the conservative liberal school of historical writing while upholding the belief in the nation as a cultural archetype available in 220

all times and places. One final section ends with a discussion related to the connection between a conservative view of politics and society and the quest for modernization of states that have been experiencing a low standard of living and modern institutions which do not fit the Western model of efficiency. Whereas, the standard perspective in the social sciences today is that: “In the seventeenth century, a series of political conflicts was won by those interested in introducing political institutions that limited the de jure power of the monarchy. This change in political institutions greatly improved economic institutions. By reducing the risk of state predation, property rights became more stable. De jure political power in the new system was in the hands of people with commercial and capitalistic interests; this led to large induced changes – for instance, in capital and financial markets – that were important for economic expansion.”449

Alexandru Duțu could not come to grips with such a reductionist scheme and had to defend a view of history that places man’s most treasured values and beliefs at the center of all actions, future deeds and fate in this world and the other. It is in reaffirming the central role of ideas, mentalities, long-forgotten traditions that Alexandru Duțu’s contribution to the social sciences, especially the history of mentalities, stands for. For the vast realm of political science, the main contribution of our study is to open brand-new vistas in the quest of a national history in comparative terms. Ideological concerns have been of prime importance in the Romanian statebuilding, which, as a process, have been neither local, nor marginal. Alexandru Duțu records the change of discourse between the old forgotten world of tradition and the modern upheaval. The scar resulting from such an ideological collusion constitutes the fabric of his own work.

A last word should be reserved to the question of originality, as well as the reason that triggered our interest in the topic. Alexandru Duțu has been the subject of a study of political 449

Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson, The Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 349-350. For a better perspective on the wideness of the topic, see Carles Boix, Susan Stokes (editors), The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics, Oxford University Press (USA), 2009.

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ideas by Ioan Stanomir450 concerning the conservative overview that is so characteristic of the Romanian historian’s writings. In this regard, we cannot but claim that when approaching the same issues in the section dedicated to the Alexandru Duțu’s ideological standing Ioan Stanomir’s hindsight had inspired us tremendously. However, we believe that Alexandru Duțu’s political stance is for the first time dealt with comparatively and that the Anglo-Saxon principals of the conservative credo have been put to the task of sieving through Alexandru Duțu’s conceptual tools. Implicitly, we stress the final conclusion on this matter as being correct and useful in establishing a common framework along distinct cultural traditions. Other topics covered in this work are indebted to Laurențiu Vlad’s foreword to the important collection of post-1989 articles by Alexandru Duțu, Lumea dinăuntru și lumea din afară, whose biographical insight had inspired us to look for more details, mainly hit upon in the enlarged forward and study published in the collective volume La dimension humaine de l’historie, have been a source of inspiration in drawing the intellectual portrait of the Romanian historian.

As far as we know from the present literature on the subject of Alexandru Duțu, all the other tasks we have ascribed to have not been dealt with before. Our attempt to draw a history of ideas in Alexandru Duțu’s case by separating a number of key concepts in his work and searching for their genealogy within the analytical structure of Alexandru Duțu’s own view on history, but in the manner of Reinhart Koselleck’s school, is unprecedented and may be opening pathways of research in the quest for a genuine Romanian historiography in the more general line of Armin Heinen and Victor Neumann. They have too shaped our methods. When debating the paramount topic of nationalism and nation-building, which for Alexandru Duțu are elements of intrusion into the core traditional cultural fabric of society, testifying to their modernity, we revert to a scholarly analysis of the different roads to modernity that the Romanian intelligentsia acknowledged right up to the 1920’s. Our frame of reference is also sociologically-minded, but contributes to emphasizing the cultural dimension, shared by Alexandru Duțu as well, prevalent in the intellectual arguments of the period. The most important assessment of Alexandru Duțu’s studies and books is to be looked for in the 450

Ioan Stanomir, Conștiința conservatoare, editura Nemira, București, 2004, pp. 149-194.

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comparative perspective the scholar puts forward between the oral and scriptural traditions before the 1800s, of multiple European foci of cultural acculturation (Byzantine, Slavic and Central European), of the going to and fro between an organic community of Byzantine cultural dissent and the prospects opened by the Enlightened West. I believe that the heart of Alexandru Duțu’s ideas that have impregnated his scholarly works is to be looked for in this section. Since writing from the angle of a political scientist has been our prerequisite from the very start, examining the Romanian historian’s investigations from such a perspective had never been addressed before. Last but not the least, questioning the religious imbued background from Alexandru Duțu’s books as an anti-modern predicament – in the sense of overtly non-secular – had added more substance to the methodological avenue of the Romanian historian of ideas. Our original interest in the large field of the history of political ideas stems from our past academic record, wherein we have proved an increased fondness for the school and the tradition of conservative thinking, especially the one alive in the British and the American cases.

In conclusion, the current paper is the first broad investigation in the particular case of Alexandru Duțu’s academic record. It is not only a scholarly attempt in the history of ideas, but, sanguinely, an interrogation into the main traditions of thought that have framed the debate concerning the type of modernization process and the vision of modernity alluded to by the intellectual elites between 1860 and 1930. At the same time, Alexandru Duțu increases the urgency for an in-depth study of the cultural identity behind the Romanian society’s twisted modernization experiment from the nineteenth century to the present age. Cultural representation through conceptual patterns reflect both the tensions within a society and its pathway towards the envisaged future.

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