Constantin Rădulescu-Motru

Radu Poppescu, who worked as a secretary for Poteca for part of his life, inherited a certain sum after the death of his employer and father; this was to take the form of a scholarship for Constantin Rădulescu.

This brought his inclusion into the last stage of a program initiated by Maiorescu as the Kingdom of Romania's Minister of Education: alongside other important cultural and scientific figures (such as Alexandru A. Philippide, Ștefan Zeletin, Ion Rădulescu-Pogoneanu, Iorgu Iordan, Simion Mehedinți, Nicolae Bănescu, P. P. Negulescu, Teohari Antonescu, and Constantin Litzica), he was given official assistance in order complete his education abroad (in order to provide Romania with a new generation of academics).

[5] On January 1, 1900, he also founded and edited Noua Revistă Română (which published articles by, among others, Nicolae Iorga, Ion Luca Caragiale, George Coşbuc, Lazăr Şăineanu, Ioan Nădejde, Ovid Densusianu, H. Sanielevici, and Garabet Ibrăileanu).

[8] In 1925, Rădulescu-Motru, Nicolae Basilescu, and Traian Bratu were part of a government-appointed committee investigating the roles of A. C. Cuza and Corneliu Șumuleanu in the anti-Semitic violence having occurred at the University of Iași in 1923–1925.

[10] It was at this time that his ideas on ethnicity (Romanianism) came to be debated by various figures on the Right, and were the subject of virulent criticism from intellectuals sympathetic to the fascist Iron Guard, who notably rejected his commitment to secularism and Maiorescu's Junimea tradition (Mircea Vulcănescu spoke against "his hostile attitude, shared by his Junimist colleagues, against the penetration of a new, religious spirit, inside the University [of Bucharest]"),[13] as well as from the nationalist modernist Lucian Blaga.

[14] According to a later assessment of his work by Vulcănescu, who had since become influenced by the centrist National Peasants' Party member Dimitrie Gusti, the latter's outlook on sociology was also in disagreement with Rădulescu-Motru's adherence to Junimist guidelines.

[16] The President of the academy at the moment when Carol II assumed dictatorial powers, he chose to support the new National Renaissance Front (FRN) regime, and moved away from party politics.

Concentrating his analysis on the impact of modernization and Westernization, he argued for a need to adapt forms to the Romanian ethnicity (which he defined through heredity),[28] and represented as the true social fundament (the "community of spirit").

[34] Taking in view the characteristics of this evolution towards petty politics, he vehemently rejected Mihai Eminescu's theory on the almost exclusively foreign origin of the bourgeoisie inside the post-Phanariote Old Kingdom.

[37] With Învăţământul filosofic în România ("Philosophical education in Romania"), his 1931 essay first published in Convorbiri Literare, Rădulescu-Motru introduced a polemic that was to mark numerous other writings of his during the following period: reacting to the growth in appeal of far right magazines that claimed to follow a Romanian Orthodox philosophy – Cuvântul and Gândirea –, he made a difference between a "belletristic" trend in higher learning and a "scientific" one, arguing in favour of the latter, and presenting the former as the objective source of anti-intellectualist attitudes he observed inside the new political phenomenon[38] (which emphasized the "human need for mystery").

[41] He even argued that principles supported by the Right in defining Romanian specificity were in fact being shared with other cultures (answering Blaga's emphasis on Romanian folklore, he pointed out that its themes were commonplace in neighbouring Balkan cultures;[42] replying to Ionescu's views on allegedly particular tendencies toward theology and metaphysics inside national culture, he stated his belief that "the prestige of the metaphor, the attraction towards mystery and the ontology of the ethnos [...] only show themselves from the second quarter of the 20th century onwards, [and are under the influence of] foreign university circles [...]";[40] he also rejected Crainic's views on Orthodoxy as the source for specificity, arguing for Christian universalism in detriment of "nationalist spirituality"[43] – an idea nevertheless interpreted by Crainic as evidence of "militant philosophical atheism").

[46] Rădulescu-Motru came to support Carol II's National Renaissance Front (FRN) and the one-party system in 1938, speaking out in favour of the kings' initiative to introduce uniforms for members of the academy (clashing over the matter with his fellow academic Nicolae Iorga, in February 1939).