„Tânăra generaţie” în haine de funcţionar. Cazul Mircea Vulcănescu
The Young Generation in Official Clothes. Mircea Vulcănescu’s Case

Summary/Abstract: The Young Interwar Generation is primarily known for its prodigious publicistic activities and the political (mis)adventures of its members. It is therefore not surprising that most studies pertaining to this generation of Romanian intellectuals have been undertaken using the venerable methodology of traditional intellectual history and its corresponding modes of analysis. More recently, however, studies concerning this phenomenon have been characterized by social history approaches. Of primary importance here is the socio-cultural context that structured the interpersonal and intergenerational relationships of these intellectuals, their gender roles, as well as their personal life-stories and career development. From a larger heuristic standpoint, such an approach enables us to gain a more nuanced insight into the society in which these writers lived. On a still more “micro” level of analysis, the scholar thus gains access to the “strategic reasoning” that informed the decisions of the historical actors in question. Such newer approaches reconstruct a livelier, more textured image of the world from which these young people originated, lived, created, and acted. Moreover, the significance of the ideas and concepts deployed by the “young generation” acquire “materiality”, that is a shape which moulds itself onto the social reality they sought to describe and critique. Let us take for example the famous theory of “forms without substance” – an idea articulated by Titu Maiorescu as early as the 19th century. This was an attempt to encapsulate the deficiencies engendered by the overly hasty policies of socio-political modernization undertaken by Romanian political and intellectual elites. Many thinkers during the interwar period subscribed to Maiorescu’s critique. Amongst them was Nae Ionescu, one of the most influential figures among the young generation. Ionescu extended Maiorescu’s critique in a more radical direction. He discounted the possibility of gradual adaptation to western models, affirming the outright incompatibility between western institutions and autochthonous traditions. One of the major themes brilliantly explored in the interwar literature was precisely this tension between the institutionalized forms of the modern state and a society with its own rules, practices, and norms; many of them at odds with the formalized prescriptions of the state. The purpose of this article is to explore some of the strategies whereby intellectuals negotiated this tension in the creative, everyday, and professional aspects of their life. My focus here is Mircea Vulcănescu, who was one of the most talented and practically skilled exponents of the “young generation”. In many ways, Vulcănescu is an atypical case. By virtue of his technocratic career, he succeeded in ascending to the higher rungs of the Greater Romanian state apparatus.

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