Ferencz-Flatz, Christian; Alex Cistelecan, “Teaching Kant in early socialist Romania”, Studies in East European Thought, 2025.
During the 1950s and ’60s, when Kant’s works were neither translated nor publicly accessible in socialist Romania, his philosophy reached students and readers through mediated instruction—public debates, university lectures, high school courses, and educational television programs. This paper explores how Kant was taught during the early decades of Romanian communism, particularly focusing on the renewed pedagogical and scholarly interest in the history of philosophy in the late 1950s. Sparked mainly by Ion Banu’s efforts, this shift laid the groundwork for more systematic engagements with Kant in the 1970s, including new translations of his work. The first part of the paper examines how Kant’s philosophy was presented in expert lectures and university courses in Bucharest and Cluj. The second part adopts an inter-medial perspective, analyzing high school materials—textbooks and films—to trace diachronic shifts in Kant’s reception into the 1980s. Taking Kant as a revealing example, the present paper thus offers a close analysis of a specific historically situated praxis of philosophical historiography within State Socialism which closely reflects the broader ideological transformations taking place within Romania’s intellectual landscape.