Abstract
As main ideologue of the Ceaușescu regime during the 1970s and a key public figure throughout its entire existence, Dumitru Popescu’s reflections on Romanian national-communism, a local brand of national-communism that he foremost helped create in the first place, are not to be overlooked. Neither are his analyses on the post-communist transition. So far, Popescu’s political thought was not systematically investigated within scientific endeavors. Moreover, it tended to be overlooked or, best case scenario, considered a sort of appendix of his impressive body of literary works and journals. The main stake of this article is to present and critically discuss how Popescu’s national-communism evolved during the 1970s and 1980s and how it endured and recalibrated itself in the first decades after the 1989 anticommunist revolution within a new ideological framework, that of overtly predatory capitalism bent on primitive accumulation despite all costs. It does so by analyzing Popescu’s ideas of personality cult, social class and youth, all of them representative for the official socialist discourse. Interestingly enough, youth can be interpreted, in Popescu’s political thought, as a form of incipient civil society. However, after 1989, this insight is gradually abandoned, as the capitalist transition with its anticommunist and pro-market ideology become dominant.
Key-words: ideology, national-communism, transition, capitalism, civil society.