Les héritages de la pensée politique de 1848 dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle

Abstract

The post 1848 period represents for the Romanian political thinkers a turning point not only in restructuring the constitutional order, but also in reconsidering and rebuilding the new meanings of Democracy as a concept. The hesitancies of those who think of Romanian Nation as a milestone of the new democratical institutions are often due to the fact that several authors of this period have a strong tendency of reinterpreting the western liberal ideas and concepts in the Romanian Nation-building context. The results of such theories are placing in the same position two aspects that in the 19th century liberalism are generally considered to be if not completely antagonistic, at least clearly separated: the vocation or the instinct of being democratic, on the one hand, and the genealogically-built Nation type. The contradiction between these two directions should be perhaps read as a source of misunderstandings in the Romanian 19th century national-liberalism, especially in the matter of rethinking concepts as citizenship, liberty, political legitimacy in a close relationship with the ethnic-based national identity.