Historians and literary scholars still working in a Cold War paradigm cast Romanian Fascism as a form of reactionary resistance to liberal modernity, and not as a competing modernizing discourse and drive. Nevertheless, in a 1933 programmatic article, the Legionnaire leader, ideologue, and ‘martyr’ Vasile Marin wrote that political concepts such as ‘the Right,’ ‘the Left,’ and ‘extremism’ lost their relevance in Romania, as well as in Europe. They had been replaced by a ‘totalitarian view of the national life,’ which was common to Fascism, National-Socialism, and the Legion. This new ‘concept’ would allow Romania to ‘overcome, by absorbing them, the democratic and socialist experiences and would create the modern state,’ – a ‘totalitarian’ state. The present article aims to consolidate the conceptual gains of ‘new consensus’ historiography, which views the Iron Guard as part of a global revolutionary movement that was spurred by the practice of a political religion promising a ‘national rebirth’ or a ‘complete cultural’ and anthropological ‘renewal.’ Far from militating for national autarchy and populist-agrarian conservatism, the two Legionnaire leaders discussed in my article sought to align Romania with the modernizing, industrializing drive of Western European Fascism.

Robert Strausz-Hupé (1903 and Stefan Possony (1913Possony ( -1995 were two scholars and policy makers who reached the peak of their careers as the tutelary spirits of the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), founded in 1955 at the University of Pennsylvania. Through the FPRI and its journal, Orbis , the influence of these two anti-"totalitarian" crusaders reached the high echelons of the United States military and U.S. policy makers.

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As a lawyer, economist and journalist of European stature, Linguet argued that the political and economic ideas advocated by the “economic philosophes,” or the physiocrats, were bound to lead to a dangerous revolution undertaken without a clear idea of the true principles of a new and better society. Linguet's opposition to the physiocrats and his support for the guilds stemmed from a radical populism that prompted him to accuse the philosophes and the physiocrats of talking about humanity while neglecting the sufferings of real human beings. Linguet warned during the 1770s and 1780s that the systematic laissez-faire theories of the philosophes and Turgot's suppression of the guilds would dissolve the traditional ties of society and lead to a conflict between a mass of unemployed people and an oppressive police state. Linguet argued that only a politics of subsistence, welfare, and preventative nurture would prevent the coming revolution. Linguet's clashes with the physiocrats would prompt him to develop a theory of underconsumption as well as a historicist understanding of political economy and of the legal system that would have a deep influence upon the history of humanist economy.

Astolphe de Custine’s collection of letters La Russie en 1839, first published in France in 1843, was rediscovered by Henri Massis in 1946. Massis re-introduced Custine’s by then long forgotten letters on Russia to the French public. Once American Cold Warriors such as George Kennan and General Walter Bedell-Smith discovered the book, they promptly promoted it to the status of the most prophetic book on the “Russian soul.” Denounced as “fictional,” by many nineteenth-century writers and by a host of twentieth-century scholars, Custine’s book was accepted as canonical by a large reading public and, more importantly, by successive generations of us policy makers. This article contributes to the historiography of Cold War propaganda by looking first at the context in which the book was initially resurrected by Massis, and then by analyzing the ways in which Cold War propaganda constructed its “relevance,” “actuality” and “prophetic” character. The article begins by taking a look at the way in which Massis, the first popularizer of the book, fitted it into his own ideological pattern. In a second movement, the article analyzes the ways in which the book functioned in the post-wwii ideological context, seeking to discover if the alleged relevance of the book had anything to do with the survival into the postwar world of the European Right’s interwar tangle of received ideas and patterns of prejudice.