DANIEL BARBU BEYOND DOGMATIC WESTERN-CENTRIC AND EASTERN-CENTRIC VIEWS ON SOCIETY AND POLITICS
DANIEL BARBU BEYOND DOGMATIC WESTERN-CENTRIC AND EASTERN-CENTRIC VIEWS ON SOCIETY AND POLITICS

Summary/Abstract: This article aims to summarize and explore four of the main topics addressedby Daniel Barbu in his writings over the last three decades, and, therefore, to foregroundhis contribution to the restoration of an authentic critical approach to (current) social andpolitical processes. Always careful to avoid monocausal narratives and categoricalstatements about society and politics, Daniel Barbu sagaciously situated his reasoningsand explanations beyond mainstream stereotypical intellectual discourses. Also, withoutexplicitly referring to them, he bypassed Western-centrism and Oriental-centrism, whichunfortunately often entrap influential scholars in the social and political sciencesliterature. The four topics discussed here to highlight Barbu’s endeavor to reaffirm theprinciple of axiological neutrality are: the articulation of Romanian society (and culture)at the convergence of traditional organicity and rationalizing modernization; the pitfallsof ideological constructs (such as apotheosis and demonization) in the study of thecommunist past; the absent res publica and the Romanian intellectual elites’ newpropensity for wooden languages and civil religions; the today (post)modern Europeandemocracies, as forms of apolitical regimes, and the (plausible) future configuration ofnon-democratic regimes.

• Details
• Contents