DISCURSUL UNIONIST ÎN CHEIE SERIALĂ
UNIONIST DISCOURSE IN A SERIAL KEY

Summary/Abstract: Meditation about the past led A. D. Xenopol, on the one hand, to a series of historical studies and syntheses, and on the other hand to a systematic conception of history itself. He identified causal series in the sequences of facts and conceived, based on that, a whole explanatory system, those Fundamental Principles of History (1899), which was going to result in La Théorie de l’histoire (1908). Everything that happens in history, the philosopher stated, could be represented by means of evolutive series, with a genesis, an ascension and a decline, according to a genetic principle that rules over the whole evolution. Xenopol confesses his preference for an evolutive, organic movement, suggesting at the same time, consensually, the accumulation process that announces, in history, every important “event”, every phenomenon with some particular significance. The finality was to be the complete unity of its people. A bridge over time relates this image to his later effort to explain the process of Romania’s unification as a historical phenomenon, first of all as a one-off reconstruction, than systematically, appealing to the idea of series. The unification represents, in Xenopol’s work, an essential chapter, on which he kept on returning. This obsession accompanied the historian even when he was not home, like an unavoidable shadow, one born from the soil of his ideal motherland, that the scholar was going to see only towards the end of his life.

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