Nation-Building and Contested Identities: Romanian & Hungarian ...

lished in 1933 in Convorbiri literare, he claimed that reflection, as a mentalact, could not have a national character. From the modernist side,Tudor Vianu also considered that the idea of national philosophy wasopposed to the freedom of reasoning. He illustrated his view by giving theexample of Descartes, who was primarily regarded as a philosopher, whilehis French identity was secondary to his identity of being a philosopher. 18These examples hint at the basic difference between theautochthonists and the modernists, which consists in the fact that theformer, who argued for a national philosophy, were not willing toaccept the legitimacy of a system of thought which was not based uponautochthonous grounds. It is important to note that, from theautochthonist perspective, the philosophy understood in national termswas seen not only as a source of inspiration, but also as a methodologicalimperative for the researcher. In this respect, whereas Crainic consideredthe philosopher to be first and foremost a Romanian, Ralea,Florian, Negulescu, or Vianu claimed that a philosopher had to be firstand foremost a philosopher. What the organicist movement of theGîndirists preached was the idea that immersing into a cultural contextshould be a national duty for all. Such an attitude places the criterionof the cultural identity of the philosopher prior to the content of whathe actually thinks. 19 This organicist conception relied upon the idea ofa racial-religious exclusion, rather than upon a political-constitutionalinclusion of those who were living within the borders of a state.Concluding RemarksThe Nationality of ReasoningLooking at similar philosophical debates, one can observe that theautochthonist vs. modernist polemic in interwar Romania was not an isolatedcase in the context of the 20 th century debates on modernity. BeforeWorld War II, several European and non-European elites faced the dilemmaof how to reconcile modernization with the attempt to preserve theauthentic structures of the society. As already mentioned, although thecauses of the conservative-fascist alliance varied from one national contextto another, the main tendency was to harmonize the collective interestswith collective identities. Mosse and Moore provided insightful explanationsconcerning the way in which the right, with its inherent politicaldifferences, responded to the competition imposed by the left, by relyingon the non-elitist politics of “big numbers.”As announced in the introduction, the identification of argumentsadopted by an intellectual elite in order to provide a philosophical foundationfor the unity of a people creates a link between the historical andthe conceptual parts of the present analysis. The authochtonist authors89