Ștefan Zeletin

The latter's father is unknown (one possibility is the local mayor and well-off landowner Neculache Brăescu), 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 mother's husband.

[2] He carried on a correspondence with several prominent intellectuals, including Iorga, Vasile Bogrea, Garabet Ibrăileanu, Gheorghe I. Brătianu, Nicolae Bagdasar, and his close friend Cezar Papacostea.

[2] Intellectual debates in interwar Romania were dominated by "traditionalists", who argued that the country should 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.

[8] There, he argued that the 1829 Treaty of Adrianople had loosened the Danubian Principalities from the constricting influence 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.

[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 country's xenophobic and anti-Semitic reaction had displayed itself.

[3] In Neoliberalismul (1927), he proposed a scientific definition of neoliberalism, enumerated its effects and identified the impediments to its gaining political currency in Romania—popular prejudice on the one hand, and on the other, doctrines such as Junimism, nationalism, Poporanism and socialism.