[1] As a youth, he attended Saints Peter and Paul High School in his native city,[1] and subsequently enrolled in the sciences faculty of the University of Bucharest, being especially interested in mathematics.
[2][3] In March 1891, by that time a student of Maiorescu's, he began attending meetings of Junimea literary society, where he met Simion Mehedinți and Mihail Dragomirescu.
[2][5] Both Negulescu and Teohari Antonescu, the archaeologist, were moved there in a bid to ensure Junimea control over the university, and to consolidate the conservative circles of Iași, against a rising tide of socialist influence.
[10] Negulescu's publishing debut came in 1892, with a metaphysical essay, Critica apriorismului și a empirismului ("A Critique of Apriorism and Empiricism"), earning him the Romanian Academy award in philosophy.
[5] The title indicates the two main philosophical currents rejected by Negulescu, who sought a middle road between transcendental idealism and resurgent anti-realism, finalism, and theism.
[15] Dragomirescu and Negulescu remained the only two Maiorescu disciples who carried on his work in pure aesthetics; others, such as Alexandru Philippide and Constantin Rădulescu-Motru, began as aestheticists, but later veered into more applied science.
[16] According to historian Z. Ornea, Negulescu stood further apart from Maiorescu not just because he questioned the more detailed aspects of his agenda, but also because he was a moderate, whereas Dragomirescu was a man of "rigid convictions" and "systematic dogmatism".
[17] His polemic with the socialists, inaugurated in Psihologia stilului, was largely tributary to the theories of Spencer, Frédéric Paulhan, and Jean-Marie Guyau, trying to show that Junimism was more in tune with modern literary criticism.
[19] However, with Religiunea și arta, Negulescu went beyond Maiorescu's theories, and closer to Dobrogeanu-Gherea's, proposing that poetic art was not just a luxury of advanced societies, but also a functional entity that contributed to social progress.
[27] While preparing for print Religiunea și arta, Negulescu found himself caught in a conflict with Nicolae Basilescu and other non-orthodox Junimists, who rejected his theories from a historicist perspective.
In resisting Basilescu, he reaffirmed his purist reading of Maiorescu's credo, namely that "truth" was the universal artistic criterion, and formal perfection an objective trait.
[29] Negulescu still argued that subjectivity was the main driver of cultural accomplishment, citing extreme (and, according to Ornea, flawed) examples of artists and intellectuals who withstood all immersion in contemporary life, from Galilei to Ingres.
[36] According to biographer Eugen Lovinescu, Negulescu was a monotonous intellectual, among the handful of students who lived up to Maiorescu's demand for "absolute fidelity" and "moral servitude".
[44] In December 1910, upon Maiorescu's retirement,[5] Negulescu was finally transferred to the history and encyclopedia of philosophy department at Bucharest; his professorship in Iași was assigned in 1915 to another Junimea favorite, Ion Petrovici.
[57] Early in 1919, Negulescu presided over a Bucharest faculty of philosophy "review commission", tasked with investigating colleagues accused of having collaborated with the occupation authorities—such cases included Florian, Rădulescu-Motru, and Rădulescu-Pogoneanu.
[2][65] His first term saw tensions inside the PP: Negulescu claimed to have exposed embezzlement by his Transylvanian subordinate, Ioan Lupaș, but that such finds were covered by up on Averescu's order.
[73] His second term cut short by the political power shifts,[5] Negulescu was appointed President of the Assembly, serving from July 1926, when Petrovici took over as Education Minister, and being reelected on November 14,[74] before ultimately stepping down in June 1927.
This period was one of political uncertainty: Negulescu's term coincided with revelations that King Ferdinand I was terminally ill with cancer, which renewed calls for a national unity government.
[77] Such works include: Reforma învățământului ("Education Reform", 1922), Partidele politice ("The Political Parties", 1926), Geneza formelor culturii ("The Genesis of Cultural Forms", 1934), Academia platonică din Florența ("The Platonic Academy in Florence", 1936), Nicolaus Cusanus (1937) and Destinul Omenirii ("The Destiny of Mankind", Vol.
[2] With his new work in aesthetics, Negulescu expanded his system into psychological determinism, from personality types; he also proposed that art history was a continuous dialogue between "critical analysis" and "imagination", which succeeded and tempered each other.
[78] Scholar Dan Grigorescu views Geneza formelor culturii as Negulescu's masterpiece, but notes that its system of references, comprising Georges Dumas, Joseph Jastrow, Ernst Kretschmer, Theodor Lipps and Paulin Malapert, was quickly outdated.
Against the protectionism favored by the intellectual class, who felt threatened by the Great Depression, he developed a meritocratic and classically liberal scheme, outlined in Destinul Omenirii.
He suggested that intellectuals were clients of the state, who expected secure jobs in the bureaucracy, but who took no personal responsibility for their fate; he favored deregulation and saw the crisis as an opportunity for advancement.
[82] Such ideas were expressly rejected by the young right-wing radicals Mircea Eliade and Mihail Polihroniade, who noted that, in his day, Negulescu had had an irreplicable chance at social advancement.
[83] Criticism also came in from the left: the communist philosopher Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu argued that Destinul Omenirii was no longer in keeping with Negulescu's earlier materialistic monism, but "finalistic" and borderline "mystical".
[89] His work upheld the notion that miscegenation was inescapable and observable in Romanian ethnogenesis,[90] and expressed skepticism toward racial serology studies, taken up locally by Sabin Manuilă.
[92] However, Nichifor Crainic of Gândirea restated the racialist argument in 1934, in a brochure which referred to Negulescu as an "old philosopher shaped by the ideological school of the bygone century".
In March 1935, alongside envoys from other groups, he participated in negotiations with Grigore Filipescu's new Conservative Party, seeking a common platform against censorship and repression.
[99] In February 1938, Averescu resigned the PP presidency and joined the king's supporters; Negulescu replaced him as the head of the moribund party, which survived until the authoritarian constitution came into force later that year, and possibly dissolved itself voluntarily.
[2][101] Partly recovered by the regime of Ion Antonescu, in March 1941 he worked with Gusti, Mihai Ciucă, Radu R. Rosetti, and Liviu Rebreanu on an Academy reform project.