tefan Zeletin

ate from the latter university in 1912, on the subject of

idealism in contemporary English philosophy and advised
by Richard Falckenberg,[1][2][3] he returned to Romania
and taught German at Codreanu. He started publishing
soon after, with Evanghelia naturii (The Gospel of Nature) coming out at Iai in 1915, and Din ara mgarilor (From the Country of the Donkeys) appearing in
1916.[2] An allegorical work about a population of donkeys that borders the Bulgarians, it drew an angry response from Nicolae Iorga, who signed his review someone who is not a donkey"; others praised the pamphlet for
its insightful analysis of Romanian society.[4] One scope
of the work was to ridicule Romanian pretensions over
Southern Dobruja, which the country had gained as a result of the Second Balkan War.[5] He moved to the national capital Bucharest in 1920, continuing to work as a
German teacher,[2] at Mihai Viteazul High School.[1]
His most important volume of sociology, Burghezia
romn (The Romanian Bourgeoisie), was published in
1925. Two years later, he became a philosophy professor
at the University of Iai.[2] His last book, Nirvana (1928),
deals with his understanding of philosophy as correlated
with poetry, with philosophys inuence on his outlook
and its being a source of inspiration for him. The work
revisited themes found in the earlier Evanghelia naturii.[6]
A sympathizer of the National Liberal Party, with leading member Vintil Brtianu a backer of his theories,
Zeletin nevertheless joined the Peoples Party.[2] He carried on a correspondence with several prominent intellectuals, including Iorga, Vasile Bogrea, Garabet Ibrileanu,
Gheorghe I. Brtianu, Nicolae Bagdasar, and his close
friend Cezar Papacostea.[1] He became gravely ill in 1930
and died four years later.[2] He was buried in Bucharests
Sfnta Vineri Cemetery by his brother Dimitrie Mot,
aided by Papacostea and Bagdasar. He never married and
had no children.[7] A popular theorist of neoliberalism in
the 1930s and '40s, his ideas were shunned after the onset of the Communist regime in 1947. His works again
began to see publication as part of anthologies in the
1970s, when his work on social development theory was
re-evaluated. Following the 1989 fall of communism, his
work reappeared in proper form and his ideas reentered
debates about political ideology and national identity.[2]

tefan Zeletin

tefan Zeletin (born tefan Mot; June 19, 1882July

20, 1934) was a Romanian philosopher, sociologist, liberal economist and political theorist.

Biography

Born in Burdusaci, Bacu County, his mother Catinca

Mot (ne Chiriac) was the daughter of tefanache
Chiriac, a local ocial of Greek origin from the nearby
village of Ursa. Her husband, the postelnic Dumitrache
Mot, died sixteen years before Zeletins birth. The
latters father is unknown (one possibility is the local
mayor and well-o landowner Neculache Brescu), and
he remained sensitive to the fact of his illegitimate birth,
adopting a pseudonym (after the Zeletin River that passes
through Burdusaci) to distance himself from his mothers
husband. He grew up in a peasant family of the bourgeoisie, which he would later analyze in his work.[1]

He attended Codreanu High School in Brlad and the theological seminary in Roman. His tertiary studies took 2 Work
place at the University of Iai (1906), of Berlin (19071908), Paris (1909-1910), Leipzig (1910), Berlin (1910- Intellectual debates in interwar Romania were dominated
1911) and Erlangen (1911).[1][2] After taking his doctor- by traditionalists, who argued that the country should
1

look to its past for its road to development; and Europeanists, who said the industrialized and urbanized West
pointed the economic and social way forward. Among
the latter camp, while Eugen Lovinescu wrote about the
transformative power of ideas, Zeletin focused on the importance of economics in Burghezia romn.[8] There,
he argued that the 1829 Treaty of Adrianople had loosened the Danubian Principalities from the constricting
inuence of long Ottoman domination, producing the
fundamental economic changes that gave rise to modern Romania.[9] He pointed out how, following the 1859
Union of the Principalities, massive Western investment
had led to the emergence of a bourgeois middle class
composed of boyars who had turned to trade, and of a
capitalist economy. Moreover, he argued that continued
industrialization and adoption of European technology,
guided by this class, were necessary for Romania to avoid
retrenchment.[9][10][11]
He drew on the theories of Werner Sombart, who posited
that foreigners bring capitalism to countries embarking
on a course of modernization, which at a later stage rebel
against perceived foreign domination.[12] Zeletin placed
early-1920s Romania at this second stage, thus explaining the nationalism of reaction that was xenophobic,
in particular anti-Semitic, directed against the countrys
Jewish community.[13] Prophetically, he suggested that
Romanians would attempt to emancipate themselves
from foreign patronage, in order to live on their own
strength"; he died before the worst of the countrys xenophobic and anti-Semitic reaction had displayed itself.[14]

REFERENCES

Nirvana. Gnduri despre lume i via (1928)

4 Notes
[1] (Romanian) Mihai Sorin Rdulescu, O carte despre tefan Zeletin, in Romnia Literar, Nr. 39/2002
[2] Ersoy, p.198
[3] Constandache, p.289
[4] Ersoy, p.199
[5] (Romanian) George Ungureanu, Problema Cadrilaterului - Diferendum territorial i repere imagologice (19131940)", Restituiri, 3/2007
[6] Constandache, p.290
[7] Zeletin, p.47
[8] Hitchins 2013, p.10
[9] Hitchins 2014, p.162
[10] Deletant, p.88-89
[11] Mishkova and Daskalov, p.44
[12] Petreu, p.193
[13] Petreu, p.194
[14] Petreu, p.194-95

He saw the liberal forms the country had adopted as be- [15] Mishkova and Daskalov, p.45
ing not articial, but well-adapted to his societys current stage of development. Adopting a semi-Marxist discourse, Zeletin held that modern capitalism was a historical necessity both unavoidable and not subject to 5 References
criticism.[11] By contrast, he viewed traditional Romanian
(Romanian) G. G. Constandache, "tefan Zeletin
culture as reactionary.[15] Among Burghezia romn's adNirvana sau elogiul reverie, in Medicin i losoe,
mirers were Ibrileanu, Tudor Vianu, Alexandru Clauvol. LVII, 4/2010, p. 289-91
dian and Constantin Noica.[3]
In Neoliberalismul (1927), he proposed a scientic denition of neoliberalism, enumerated its eects and identied the impediments to its gaining political currency
in Romaniapopular prejudice on the one hand, and
on the other, doctrines such as Junimism, nationalism,
Poporanism and socialism. Constantin Rdulescu-Motru,
Nae Ionescu, Virgil Madgearu and Nicolae Rou accused
him of holding materialist, Marxist or socialist views.[3]

Bibliography
Evanghelia naturii (1915)
Din ara mgarilor. nsemnri (1916)
Burghezia romn (1925)
Neoliberalismul (1927)

Dennis Deletant, Romanias Return to Europe. Between Politics and Culture, in Raymond Detrez,
Barbara Segaert (eds.), Europe and the Historical
Legacies in the Balkans. Peter Lang, Berne, 2008.
ISBN 978-90520-137-4-9
Ahmet Ersoy et al. (eds.), Modernism: Representations of National Culture. Central European University Press, Budapest, 2010. ISBN 978-96373-2664-6
Keith Hitchins,
Interwar Southeastern Europe Confronts the
West: The New Generation: Cioran, Yanev,
Popovi", in Costic Brdan (ed.), Philosophy, Society and the Cunning of History in
Eastern Europe. Routledge, London, 2013.
ISBN 978-11357-611-6-5

3
A Concise History of Romania. Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, 2014. ISBN
978-05218-723-8-6
Diana Mishkova and Roumen Daskalov, "'Forms
without Substance': Debates on the Transfer of
Western Models to the Balkans, in Roumen
Daskalov, Diana Mishkova (eds.), Entangled Histories of the Balkans, vol. II. Brill, Leiden, 2014.
ISBN 978-90042-619-0-7
Marta Petreu, Cioran sau un trecut deocheat.
MintRight, 2011. ISBN 978-97346-208-7-6
C. D. Zeletin, tefan Zeletin: contribuii documentare. Editura Corgal Press, Bacu, 2002. ISBN
978-97380-174-7-4

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