Cultural Currents and Political Choices: Romanian Intellectuals in the Banat to 1848

Abstract

Most theories of nationalismdepend to a greater or lesser extent on formulating explanations in terms of the dynamic relationship between culture and politics in the development of a given ethnic group. Nationalism was famously defined by Ernest Gellner as “a political principle which holds that the political and the cultural unit should be congruent.” Irrespective of whether such a cultural unit is considered to be “real” or “imagined,” “primordial” or “constructed”—and however one might define culture and politics—there is a widespread consensus in the theoretical literature that nations owe a great deal to the activities of the literary elite who saw their role as creating and defining a group identity for a given people; and that these activities gradually became the basis for mass activism and a claim to political sovereignty. In the words of Miroslav Hroch, “the national consciousness has found expression in the conduct, the activities, of concrete personalities.” The historians task, therefore, becomes that of “finding out which kinds of social media within the emerging small nation afforded a relatively stronger response to patriotic agitation.”