Public Intellectuals and the Crisis of Democracy. An Ideological Analysis

The central hypothesis underlying this paper is that public intellectuals play a particularly important role in the plan of democratic operation. Being a part of the elites whose agreement is necessary in order to maintain the public opinion’s confidence in the functioning of the political system, intellectuals contribute, through the projections that they disseminate in the public space, to the formation of the cultural-political perceptions shared at the level of society. I aim at exemplifying the role played by public intellectuals in two historical and political situations particular to Romania, the crisis of democracy during the interwar period and the crisis of the current post-communist democracy. The idea I embrace is that there is an ideological continuity between the anti-democratic options of some important interwar public intellectuals and those of some of the intellectuals who are representative for the current political establishment. On the other hand, I do not intend to claim that such opinions concerning the democratic political system are specific to the Romanian area but, quite on the contrary, I aim to include them into a populist trend which was visible during the interwar period either in the shape of fascism or that of bolshevism and which, currently, takes a new form, that of intellectual populism.