Cinismul mesianic: Silviu Brucan, de la socialismul cu față umană la neoliberalismul fără mască
Alex Cistelecan
Descriere autor:
Babeș-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca Janovics Center for Screen and Performing Arts Studies; George Emil Palade University of Medicine, Pharmacy, Science and Technology, Târgu-Mureș
E-mail:
E-mail personal autor:
altcistelecan@gmail.com
4
Rubrica:
Studii culturale
Abstract: The article reconstructs the evolution of Silviu Brucan’s perspectives on global and local politics. This evolution displays a passage from a position of reformist, humanist socialism in the 1970s, to a critique of state socialism as rigid bureaucratic regimes, unable to implement the scientific-technological revolution raging in the West, in the 1980s, leading finally, in the 1990s, to a hardcore neoliberal, authoritarian blueprint for reform in the post-communist East. Interestingly, these various outlooks have been couched, throughout the decades, in more or less the same theories, arguments, and even formulations. Thus, the article has the interest of showing not only the evolution in the thought and outlook of an important high-placed communist and post-communist dignitary and advisor of those in power, but also the more general relevancy of showing the contextual meaning and application of political ideas, or how seemingly leftist ideas in the 1970s can function as rightist capitalist apology in the 1990s.
Keywords: Silviu Brucan, communist Romania, post-communist transition, state socialism, world politics, authoritarian neoliberalism.
Acknowledgment: The research presented in this paper was conducted as part of the project “Philosophy in Late Socialist Europe: Theoretical Practices in the Face of Polycrisis”, PNRR-III-C9-2022 – I8 – CF104/15.11.2022.
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