Introduction

The reception of existentialism and phenomenology in the Soviet Union and the state socialist countries of Eastern Europe, while intertwined in important ways with the chronology of existentialism, structuralism, and poststructuralism as dominant Western philosophical trends in the postwar period, should also be understood within the broader history of postwar contestation outside the Western core. Their reception is closely linked to liberation struggles and the aftermath of Western colonial rule in the Global South, but also complexly situated within glocalized cultural and intellectual traditions. Yoav Di-Capua showed that in the late 1950s, “the Arab world boasted of having the largest existentialist scene outside Europe,” as the shaping of a new, “free,” and cosmopolitan philosophy took inspiration from Jean-Paul Sartre’s works. Sartre became a “household name” in Beirut, Cairo, Baghdad, and Damascus (Di-Capua 2018, p. 1) and was translated in the Arab world alongside Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Jaspers, Camus, Unamuno, Ortega, and Berdyaev. Yet soon after, in 1967, Sartre quickly became a nomina odiosa in the Arab world. He was denounced for signing a pro-Zionist manifesto during the Third Arab–Israeli War, a gesture Edward Said later described as a “bitter disappointment to every (non-Algerian) Arab who admired him” (Di-Capua 2018, p. 4). In the Middle East, Sartre and existentialism were interpreted and criticized in relation to religion. A prominent member of the Hareket journal, the “Islamic socialist” Nurettin Topçu declared in 1970 that “what Sartre calls freedom isn’t freedom at all.” At the same time, he valued Kierkegaard “as a religious alternative to capitalist society” (Armaner 2009, pp. 8, 10). In comparison, in South Korea in the 1950s, in the aftermath of Japanese colonial rule, ```existence’ and ‘existentialism’ became terms that referred to the works of Sartre,” while reading Kierkegaard was used “only as an introduction to a discussion on Sartre and Heidegger” (Pyo Jae-myeong 2009, p. 136).

Eastern European existentialism has so far been studied with reference to Western philosophy, as a consequence of long-standing local cultural debates as well as the East–West Cold War imaginary and the way in which its successive revisions shaped the historiographical discourse of the late socialist and postsocialist periods. Recent research however, particularly Michael Gubser’s analysis of phenomenology in postwar Czechoslovakia and Poland, has demonstrated a sensitivity to the complexity of Central Europe’s local intellectual contexts and has characterized Central European phenomenological thought as a tradition to be recovered and utilized for contemporary social philosophy (Gubser 2014). The case of Romania further complicates this picture. The Central European phenomenological tradition that Gubser reconstructed “offered a personalist and communitarian social vision distinct from both liberalism and totalitarianism” (Gubser 2014, p. 229). In this tradition, Heidegger played primarily a subordinate role. In Romania, however, despite staunch resistance to Heidegger within the philosophical establishment during most of the state socialist period, his rediscovery in the late 1970s and 1980s coincided with a broader restructuring of cultural debates around national ideology and the partial reintegration of the interwar intellectual heritage. Phenomenology had been the foremost method of inquiry for Nae Ionescu’s school of thought in the interwar period (Cernica 2020), and his close links to the Romanian fascist movement were crucial to the fierce attack on local existentialist voices in the first postwar decade. Subsequently, existentialism in Romania became associated mainly with the figure of Sartre and the changing attitudes toward his writings and politics. In the early 1970s, the work of existentialist authors became increasingly disconnected from existentialism, and Sartre’s own appeal as a possible mediator between revisionist Marxism and existentialism waned. The fact that several of the authors discussed in this paper continued to show interest in existentialism, while simultaneously exploring structuralist themes, should not be considered an anomaly, but studied further in the dialectical spirit in which the authors themselves understood the relationship between humanism and structuralism, as well as in line with challenges to “the received doxa that the generation of ‘poststructuralist’ philosophers broke decisively with existentialism and rendered it out of date, a mere historical curiosity” (Reynolds and Woodward 2014, p. 260).

Pluralization in the field of philosophy, originally the result of a cautious revisionist Marxism, also enabled philosophy’s central contribution to the edification of national ideology, especially in the debates surrounding the figure of Constantin Noica and his group of disciples (Verdery 1991). Phenomenology became a source of “resistance through culture” and moral legitimacy in the 1980s and postsocialist period, when it could be harnessed by its proponents to position themselves as central public intellectuals. This brief chronology should be considered in the broader context of cultural politics in Socialist Romania, from the Stalinist period of the 1950s and renewed intellectual repression around 1958, to the controlled liberalization of the early 1960s culminating in what many intellectuals understood as a thaw around 1968, quickly followed by reideologization from the beginning of the 1970s (sometimes described as “neo-Stalinism”), and culminating over the turn of the decade and in the 1980s with “national communism.”

Existentialism was widely discussed in the cultural and literary press from the early 1960s onward (Contemporanul, România literară, Amfiteatru, Secolul 20, etc.), sometimes by the same philosophers whose articles we analyze in this paper, at other times by literary scholars, playwrights, or art historians. This is especially true of Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Camus, who were increasingly translated from the mid-1960s onward, and whose plays were widely performed to positive reviews.Footnote 1 From the beginning of the 1950s, literary existentialism was described by critics such as H. Bratu as a byproduct of “decomposing” and “Marshallized countries,” and as having a “gangster conception of the world” through the works of John Dos Passos, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, the “pornographer Henry Miller,” and “Sartre’s existentialists” (Bratu 1951). As late as the end of the 1950s, such pejorative labels were still common. When analyzing Camus’ La Peste (1947) in 1957, which had not yet been translated into Romanian, literary critic Mircea Zaciu stated that “it is certain that in some years the existentialist imprint of some passages will only be met with a condescending smile because of its naivety” (Zaciu 1957). This perspective began to change only in the 1960s. In the case of Camus, for example, the 1965 translation of La Peste, by Eta and Marin Preda (the latter the most prominent prose writer in Socialist Romania), was acknowledged in the literary press as “the existentialist novel and the road of freedom” by Georgeta Horodincă in 1963, “the social success of existentialism” by V. Moglescu in 1964, or “a high humanitarian message” by Rodica Tohăneanu in 1966. Sartre’s 1963 Les Mots was also translated by Georgeta Horodincă in 1965, and an excerpt from his 1938 La Nausée appeared in 1967. The entire novel was only rendered in 1981, proving that his Marxist profile required more clarification in order to fully enter public literary conscience. Camus’s drama Caligula, which premiered in Cluj in 1969 and in Bucharest in 1980, reached its 200th performance in 1988 (Diaconu 2019, p. CCXVIII).

For Romanian writers, as the “Young prose writers and literary criticism” round-table in 1964 shows, “a philosophy the likes of existentialism can fuel both the disintegrating literature of Samuel Beckett, who has come to deny the human, and the iconoclast fury of the Beat generation” (Goldis̨ 2011, p. 79). Sartre’s ideas and existentialism in general came to the aid of literary criticism in many ways, as Alex Goldis̨ shows, and for the young critics like Nicolae Manolescu “the existentialist filigree introduces a militant note, of more acute implication in the ideology of ‘aesthetic autonomy’’’ (Goldis̨ 2011, p. 139). By the end of the decade, existentialism became, if not a “method,” at least a crucial “language” for literary criticism both for interpreting the local literary production, as Mircea Martin used it in his 1969 Generat̨ie s̨i creat̨ie (Generation and creation), and for the general theory of literature, as structuralist critics such as Toma Pavel and Sorin Alexandrescu used the works of Heidegger and Maurice Blanchot as sources (Goldis̨ 2011, pp. 195–196). The importance of existentialism for local literary debates in the period is also illustrated by the works of Adrian Marino, where Goldis̨ observes that “the autonomy of the literary work is not justified, for Romanian literary criticism, on a stylistic or structuralist critique, centered on language or text, but on an existentialist philosophy which favored the values of life and individualism” (Goldis̨ 2011, p. 222). As for phenomenology, although sporadic texts were published from the late 1960s, repercussions could be harsh, and translations from Heidegger remained rare until the late 1970s.Footnote 2 The contribution of the cultural press to the popularization of existentialism and phenomenology under state socialism undoubtedly deserves a separate analysis.

In this paper, we set out to analyze the reception of existentialism in the two main philosophical journals of the time: Cercetări filozofice (Philosophical research) (1954–1963) and Revista de filozofie (Journal of philosophy) (1964–1989). We do not argue either that they were representative of the entire philosophical profession in Romania or that they should only be considered relevant in themselves. These were the official journals of the Institute of Philosophy of the Romanian Academy, later the Academy of Social and Political Sciences, and as such purported to represent the mainstream of what we will describe in this paper as “the philosophical establishment” or “institutionalized philosophy.” The journals featured among their editors the institutionally best-established philosophers at the time, such as members of the Academy or heads of research institutes and philosophy faculties from the main universities in the country. It is worth noting that the journals by no means covered the entire breadth of philosophical production at the time, and in that clearly played the role of both representation and gatekeeping. Cercetări filozofice and later Revista de filozofie also showcased, with various degrees of prominence over the years, the official party line on matters of ideological production more generally, and therefore the latter has been described as “a publication of mixed character: propagandistic, through the articles with which it opened, and on the other hand philosophical, through the studies that followed under the other sections, from which there were often missing not just references to Ceauşescu, but also the classics of Marxism” (Tănăsescu 2021, p. 25). This has been contrasted with other series published by the Institute of Philosophy, notably Studies in the History of World Philosophy (which came out annually between 1969–1989, and in the period 1969–1973 published no materials on Marxism–Leninism; see Tănăsescu 2021). We take this mix to be representative of a flagship philosophy journal during state socialism, and indeed also illustrative, as we will show in this paper, for the ways in which ideological considerations could be constantly revised from within from the 1950s until the end of the 1980s. The sections featured in the two journals changed over the years, but generally consisted of studies, debates, lessons or consultations, reports from scientific events in Romania or abroad, occasional thematic sections, and from the very first issue in 1954 critical, bibliographical, and review sections. The latter will figure prominently in this paper, as they showcase the immediate reception of existentialism, if not its integration into local philosophical debates, as some of the studies we discuss did more clearly.

Focusing on these journals rather than the broader cultural press means that we are less likely to encounter any distant outliers in terms of interpretation and more likely to observe that changes in discourse were gradual. At the same time, the genre of the academic article allowed for more in-depth engagement and careful articulation of arguments and is therefore better suited for tracking creative hybridizations of philosophical thought, of which we are particularly interested in Marxist approaches to existentialism. These articles were later collected or become the cornerstones of books, or stemmed from doctoral dissertations defended at universities in Bucharest, Cluj, Iaşi, or Timişoara, which later appeared in print (e.g., Ghişe 1967; Gulian 1972a,b). Published volumes are also beyond the scope of our article, but our analysis nevertheless points out the main directions in which the arguments put forward in the philosophical journals were later developed.

With regard to the methodological toolkit used here, we have opted for a mixed approach, combining quantitative analysis with hermeneutic textual analysis. The former consists of a search for terms in the digital archive of the two main philosophy journals in Romania during state socialism, Cercetări filozofice and Revista de filozofie, comprising about 5000 scholarly articles and reviews. We searched both for the root word “existentalis-” and for specific authors associated with existentialism and phenomenology—Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl—in order to uncover the connections between debates about specific authors and the debate on existentialism in general. As we found during this quantitative research, some existentialist authors provided too little data—Søren Kierkegaard, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, and Merleau-Ponty—so we decided to make this a case study of the foremost authors—i.e., those who provided sufficient data for a comprehensive understanding of the instrumentalizations of existentialism in Romania, with special focus on Sartre’s reception. Throughout this paper, when referring to terms or names as occurrences in our quantitative analysis, they will appear in quotation marks. The hermeneutic analysis is informed by intellectual history and the history of political thought, especially its insistence on the importance of reading texts in their political, institutional, and intellectual context (Freeden 1996; Trencsényi et al. 2018; Lóránd 2018). A similar mixed methodology was used to analyze the review section of the main philosophy journal in Hungary, Magyar Filozófiai Szemle. This revealed trends in academic engagement with Western philosophy that, according to the authors, would have been apparent neither from the analysis of state policy and institutional histories nor from philosophers’ private memoirs (Szücs 2018, p. 280). In this paper, we also aim to identify long-term changes in philosophical discourse that would otherwise be difficult to detect through hermeneutic analysis alone, if only because of the sheer volume of sources. Conversely, it is the in-depth interpretation of the texts around the turning points identified through quantitative analysis that suggests further quantitative research from one section to the other in this paper. First, we provide an overview of the critique of existentialism in the 1950s. Second, we discuss the relative popularity of the major existentialist authors from the late 1960s to the late 1970s. Third, we analyze the autochthonization and atomization of existentialism and phenomenology in the 1980s and point out their consequences in the postsocialist period.

Existentialism without existentialists: The critique of irrationalism past and present in the 1950s

In the 1950s, the critique of existentialism in Romania’s main philosophical journal, Cercetări filozofice, was generally predictable, in that it operated with the distinction between the irrationalism, decadence, and idealism of bourgeois philosophy spun by capitalism and imperialism and the rationalism, realism, and progressiveness of Marxist philosophy. Over the course of the decade, this evolved from a critique of existentialism without existentialists—a vigorous critique of existentialism without mention of existentialist authors—to a nominal critique, directed at the likes of Kirkegaard, Sartre, Camus, and Heidegger, but only superficially rooted in exegesis of their philosophical texts by the end of the decade; and finally, to a critical analysis of existentialism that in the 1960s took an in-depth look at its philosophical underpinnings, suggesting a possible rapprochement with Marxist humanism around 1968.

The quantitative analysis shows the cutoff for what we term the critique of “existentialism without existentialists” in 1960, when the first volume of Sartre’s Critique de la raison dialectique was published. As Graph 1 shows in relation to mentions of “Sartre,” it was not until 1961 that they reached relevant numbers and drove discussions of “existentialism” along. Until then, no other relevant existentialist philosopher or phenomenological analysis was mentioned significantly—except for Edmund Husserl, who was not discussed as an existentialist author—although the critique of existentialism was highly relevant for the journal, as we detail below. When Sartre took a stand against contemporary Soviet Marxism–Leninism in 1960,Footnote 3 the debate over existentialism became personal, and “Sartre” was the main reason for the increase in occurrences of the term in the debates. In 1968, Sartre was again responsible for the larger number of mentions of “existentialism” and here we witness a different approach in the journal, i.e., he was mostly discussed with reference to his evolution toward Marxism and further toward communism, and thus rehabilitated.

Graph 1
figure 1

Occurrences of “existentialism” and “Sartre” in \(CF\) and RdF (1954–1989)

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Several features of the more dogmatic texts from the 1950s and early 1960s deserve closer examination. First, critiques of existentialism and phenomenology in the 1950s doubled as critiques of interwar bourgeois decadence and its turn toward idealist philosophy. This was consistent with similar pronouncements in Eastern Europe, some of which were translated in Cercetări filozofice (Bînkov 1955). What distinguished the Romanian contributions from the others was the fact that they reproduced the trope of cultural inferiority and directed it against contemporary Western culture.

The most vivid formulation of this type of argument came from Pavel Apostol, whose own path as a philosopher reflects the complexities of reckoning with the interwar intellectual past under state socialism. Apostol earned a doctorate in philosophy in 1948 and headed the Historical and Dialectical Materialism Department at the Babeş University in Cluj until 1952, when he was publicly expelled from the party and arrested. Apostol, who was of Hungarian–Jewish origin, was accused of being a member of Zionist youth organizations in the interwar period, of espousing a nationalist stance as a journalist in the immediate postwar period, and of supporting fascist and bourgeois intellectuals after 1948.Footnote 4 After his release from prison in 1955, he worked as a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy in Bucharest and completed a two-volume study on Hegel’s dialectical logic. In the texts he published in Cercetări filozofice in the first years after his release, Apostol was fiercely critical of contemporary bourgeois philosophy, which, in his opinion, “reflects the social and historical situation of a class that is decomposing: focused on itself, disconnected and hostile to all that is alive and viable in society, delirious in the sterile contemplation of its own uselessness, praying to the terrible fear that it ultimately represents nothing for the future of society (the social origin of the obsession with nothingness in bourgeois philosophy)” (Apostol 1955, p. 129).

One of his articles is of utmost importance for understanding the reception and role of existentialism within socialist realism. In ```Terror of history’ and praise of the return to animality,” 1955, Apostol took up arguments from the critique of Western society and culture, links to fascism, as well as the critique of a model of imitation, as his argument also extended to the existentialist and phenomenological philosophy of the interwar period in Romania. The philosophy of figures such as Nae Ionescu, who was immensely influential among young intellectuals, while he also vehemently supported the extreme right, was described by Apostol as epigonal and lacking originality: ```native Romanian’ existentialism is nothing more than a translation of Heidegger’s existentialism into common theological language,” he argued, which “by preaching acceptance of suffering, of evil in the world […] aimed at diverting the attention of the masses from the real, social causes of misery and the shameless, cruel, savage exploitation of the people.” Apostol understood this as a means to celebrate war and sacrifice, to “justify ‘Romanian’ imperialism ‘philosophically’’’ (Apostol 1955, p. 129), and even to “support the idea of a conflict between the Occident and the Orient” (Apostol 1957, p. 128). In a second step, he related his criticism of existentialism to prominent interwar Romanian intellectuals who continued writing in emigration after the Second World War, such as Emil Cioran and Mircea Eliade, who were often seen as reactionary thinkers, just as Vladimir Solovyov and Nikolai Berdyaev were criticized in Soviet debates. Eliade’s post-emigration fame in the West was a particularly sore point. In his commentary on The Myth of Eternal Return (1949), which he read in a 1953 German translation, Apostol noted that Eliade applied the cyclical vision of history he had developed in the interwar period, which Apostol read as justifying the exploitation at the heart of capitalism, to the history of the West. “How terrible it must be for the cause of the Western bourgeoisie,” he mused, “if the losers of Romanian history can play the role of its saviors!” (Apostol 1955, p. 130). In this way, the Romanian existentialists were dismissed as imitators, part of a self-colonizing decadent movement of the East European bourgeoisie. Anti-existentialism was simultaneously a form of anti-elitism, pitying local importers of existentialism as unoriginal imitators of Western individualist thought.

Apostol’s sources for his critique of contemporary existentialism were established orthodox Marxist–Leninist authors from Eastern Europe, such as György Lukács, whose 1952 The Destruction of Reason he reviewed very favorably in the journal, or Georg Mende, whose 1956 Studien über die Existenzphilosophie he reviewed a year later (Apostol and Öffenberger 1956; Apostol 1957). This brings us to the second important feature of the 1950s critique of existentialism: its contemporary intellectual points of reference, whether in terms of substantiating the critique, as in the case of Apostol, or in terms of constructing the object of the critique, were very diverse and their geography did not follow the neat ideological divide between East and West. At a time when existentialism was rarely mentioned in philosophical articles, let alone as a standalone topic of inquiry, the review section of Cercetări filozofice was lively with mentions of the critique of bourgeois philosophy, including existentialism and phenomenology, and more generally of the “new conservatism” in the American journals Science and Society, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, or The Journal of Philosophy (Grünberg 1957; M.C. 1957; T.P. 1958), the most recent issues of which reached Romanian philosophers with negligible delay. French critiques of existentialism and the social role of intellectuals also found favor with reviewers, such as Roger Garaudy’s 1957 Humanisme marxiste or Jean Kanapa’s 1957 Situation de l’intellectuel (Neagoe 1958, 1959).Footnote 5 Soviet philosophers’ criticism of bourgeois ideology was relayed in reports of research visits in the Soviet Union, from the World Congress of Philosophy, or through reviews of collections of articles translated into Romanian, under titles such as Contemporary subjective idealism: critical essays (Ioanid 1958; M.G. 1958; Grünberg 1958). Finally, the positive reception of the work of Mexican Marxist philosopher Emilio Uranga and criticism of the phenomenological critique of existentialism by Chilean philosopher José Echeverría show that the interests of Romanian philosophers in the 1950s and early 1960s also extended to the Global South (D.B. 1960; Grünberg 1958).Footnote 6 The geography of the critique of existentialism in Romania was thus much more balanced than one would expect based on top-down accounts of the Gheorghiu-Dej regime’s cultural politics during the decade, which focused on censorship and repression (Vasile 2011).

The third and final feature of the early critique of existentialism that we would like to discuss at greater length is its generational character. In its sharpness, Pavel Apostol’s critique was already somewhat out of step with the overall tone of Cercetări filozofice, which became increasingly professionalized in the 1950s. Apostol’s early texts were animated by the antifascist and class-struggle ethos more typical of the beginning of the decade, as well as by a preoccupation with ideological orthodoxy that was undoubtably rooted in the experience of unpredictable waves of purges among intellectuals, which had seen Apostol, among others, sent to prison. Together with articles by C. I. Gulian, Henri Wald, or Ludwig Grünberg, they speak of a shared generational experience of interwar antisemitic violence and antifascist organizing, followed by postwar radical Marxist–Leninist cultural reconstruction with its purging of bourgeois intellectuals. This was a generation that both participated in and repeatedly fell victim to the enforcement of Marxist–Leninist orthodoxy in philosophy from positions of authority in universities and the Academy, a situation to which they adapted with varying degrees of conformism or direct contribution to the enforcement of the ideological line. As Felicia Waldman noted about the fate of Jewish professors at the University of Bucharest in the first half of the 20th century, “individuals usually had options, but personal ambition often dictated how they were chosen and whether morality would play a role in the process” (Waldman 2018, p. 264).

After coming under public criticism in 1948, philosopher C. I. Gulian became one of the most important advocates of orthodoxy in the field of philosophy. He was a professor at the University of Bucharest and head of the Department of Philosophy (1953–1975), head of the Department and then of the Institute of Philosophy at the Academy (1949–1971), and editor-in-chief of Cercetări filozofice. Gulian engaged with existentialism only sporadically, including in his 1957 volume on method and system in Hegel’s work, in which he criticized the existentialist interpretation of the Phenomenology of Spirit as a philosophy of ```the tragic of existence, anxiety and death’ […] instead of a dialectics of oppression and alienation” (Adler 1958, p. 167). However, in a 1958 article that marked a new period of ideological intensification in Romania, Gulian wrote vehemently against contemporary attempts to “humanize” Marxism based on Marx’s early writings and his thinking on socialist morality and alienation. Gulian’s critique referred in the same breath to bourgeois existentialist philosophers Sartre and Camus, socialist politician André Philipp, theologian Pierre Bigo, and Polish revisionists Roman Werfel and Leszek Kołakowski. Gulian opposed their attempts to interpret Marxism as ethics—i.e., to separate it from scientific socialism as its revolutionary political practice—by referring to orthodox Marxism–Leninism. He emphasized the class character of bourgeois law and ethics, explained the development of socialist morality according to the Marxist law of base and superstructure, and affirmed the working class as the only source of socialist morality determined by the political goals of the transition from socialism to communism and thus the only source for the realization of “true humanism” (Gulian 1958).

In the following years, bourgeois philosophy was again severely criticized. Henri Wald wrote a scathing critique of phenomenology as a subjectivist, idealist, and metaphysical response to issues of dialectical unity between object and subject, between ontology, gnoseology, and logic, between theory and method in philosophy, etc. (Wald 1960). This came after his own 1959 book on dialectical logic was publicly criticized for contradicting the classics of Marxism–Leninism on the issue of the identity between dialectics, the theory of knowledge, and logic. After repeated administrative sanctions, he was removed from the University of Bucharest and the Institute of Philosophy in 1962. He had taught at the university after the war, from which he was expelled as the son of Jewish merchants, and survived forced labor and the Bucharest pogrom protected by friends (Conovici 2000).

Philosopher Ileana Mărculescu, discussing the issue of consciousness as formulated by Marx and Engels in their critical revision of Hegelian phenomenology, reviewed debates about consciousness in Western psychology and philosophy and arrived at a critique of existentialism’s denial of the Marxist idea of objectivation, which she deemed “an anti-scientific, irrationalist crusade against objectivity” (Mărculescu 1959, p. 87). Mărculescu renewed the theory of reflection and, in particular, the possibility of objectivation in relation to consciousness—i.e., the materialization of the knowledge that consciousness has of itself, as represented in cybernetics. Over the next decade, her position gradually evolved into a recognition of “the subjective aspect of philosophical activity” in articles she published in 1967–1968; a call to intellectuals from socialist countries to reconsider the question of freedom, which she formulated at the third Christian–Marxist symposium in Marianske Lazne, Czechoslovakia, in 1967; and the definition of philosophy as a science of the spirit, the metaphysical implications of which did not go uncriticized in the Romanian press in 1968 (Shafir 1984, pp. 449–451). Mărculescu’s intellectual trajectory in the 1950s and 1960s, which eventually led to emigration to the US in the early 1970s, exemplifies a broader change in the attitude of the philosophical establishment toward bourgeois philosophy in general, the issues of existentialism and subjectivity in particular, and finally, the understanding of the role of philosophy and philosophers in society.

An existentialist among Marxists: Reflections on Sartre’s intellectual path in the 1960s

By the mid-1960s, criticism of existentialism grew quieter. Although Gulian’s basic argumentation in favor of Marxism did not fundamentally change, the tone and intent of his articles certainly did. When he wrote about axiology in bourgeois philosophy in 1964, he was much more careful about distinguishing between different kinds of approaches, including existentialism, as more or less progressive or nonscientific and reactionary (Gulian 1964a). He also distinguished between different authors, claiming, for example, that Heidegger’s existentialism, compared to Jaspers’, went further in its “aim to isolate man from nature and society” (Gulian 1965, p. 1557). The first moment in which existentialism was used in Revista de filozofie without an implicit negative connotation was an article by Pavel Cîmpeanu on Kafka’s literature (Cîmpeanu 1965a).Footnote 7 This was part of a larger rehabilitation of modernism and existentialism at the dawn of Ceauşescu’s regime, who legitimized his first years in rule through seemingly distancing himself from the Soviet Union. In describing Kafka as an existentialist writer who simultaneously reflected on the objective and structurally absurd reality of bourgeois society, Cîmpeanu used existentialism as a neutral and even functional adjective—along the lines of the literary critics of the 1960s, as discussed in our introduction. Existentialism became a frequently implied label and “language”—as Goldis̨ puts it—in literary studies, so that Cîmpeanu had a unique opportunity in the more rigid journals of philosophy: extracting existentialism from a long series of diatribes. More generally, this coincided with the moment when existentialism entered literary debates, with world-literature authors seen as existentialist writers retrospectively—from Fyodor Dostoevsky to Eugen Ionesco. Nevertheless, this was achieved through a temporal displacement of Kafka, as Cîmpeanu followed Walter Kaufman and W. Heiney in claiming that Kafka was more of a classical writer than a contemporary one.Footnote 8

More neutral references to existentialism such as Cîmpeanu’s coexisted in Revista de Filozofie with continued criticism of bourgeois philosophy in the familiar terms of the previous decade, for example, Al. Boboc’s “The phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and contemporary irrationalism” (Boboc 1965). In the second part of his article on Kafka, published a month later, even Cîmpeanu took care to explicitly distinguish Kafka from existentialism, arguing that interpreting Kafka as “poet of failure, of the existentialist type,” is only partly justified (Cîmpeanu 1965b, p. 1461). This type of argument became more common in analyses of cultural production from the mid-1960s onward, as in Ion Pascadi’s article on contemporary drama in which he clarified that “if one criticizes the flawed philosophical position [i.e., existentialism] that is at the heart of these works, one should not bypass the real human problems put forward by Sartre, O’Neil, or Tennessee Williams, which in turn must be understood within the social-historical framework in which they occur” (Pascadi 1965, p. 1016).

Compared to the cultural press, Revista de filozofie was somewhat behind its time in terms of the reception of existentialism, taking up controversial positions less frequently, but generally offering more detailed accounts. A good example of this is the way it covered the colloquium Morale e società organized by the Gramsci Institute in Rome in 1964. As Christian Ferencz-Flatz and Alex Cistelecan point out in the introduction to this issue, the colloquium was a highly unequal encounter between Marxist philosophers and Jean-Paul Sartre, in which the participants’ political camps were generally preserved and the French and Marxist revisionist debates ran almost in parallel. But what was the meeting’s echo back in Romania, and how did it affect the reception of existentialism and Sartre? As the only Romanian participant, C. I. Gulian wrote about the colloquium in Contemporanul (The contemporary) and in the main party-ideological journal, Lupta de clasă (The class struggle) in 1964. He argued that the meeting had been, on the one hand, an opportunity for Marxist philosophers to address topics that were in danger of being monopolized by the representatives of “subjectivism” and, on the other hand, it had been necessary in order to reopen the debate between Marxism and existentialism, since Sartre’s position had evolved over the years and showed “tendencies […] to overcome old subjectivist positions.” Gulian’s opinion of Sartre’s humanistic thought was overwhelmingly positive, highlighting his change of perspective as evidence of the validity of Marxism. He suggested that Marxists should look more closely at issues such as subjectivity, individuality, freedom, and values (Gulian 1964a, p. 7). In his more developed version of the argument, published in Lupta de clasă, Gulian articulated this as the agenda of a Marxist “philosophical anthropology” and the core of Marxist humanism (Gulian 1964b).

Revista de filozofie also published a reflection on the colloquium a year later. Authored by Fred Mahler, it was based on a close reading of the participants’ contributions, which had been published in the French and Italian press in the meantime. Mahler described the colloquium in terms of “a theoretical confrontation,” but despite this framing and the occasional simplification of the relationship between Marxism and existentialism, he reconstructed in detail the participants’ arguments, especially Roger Garaudy’s and Sartre’s. He appreciated the latter’s critique of positivism, but ultimately concluded that Sartre was still far from a dialectical solution to the problem of ethics, freedom, and determinism. Interestingly, toward the end of his article, Mahler reiterated the distinction between drawing on some results of non-Marxist philosophy to elaborate a Marxist ethics and refraining from taking a critical stance toward their fundamentally nonscientific basis. This remark was explicitly meant as a denunciation of Marxist revisionism—or of the idea, which he saw formulated by Karl Kosik, that the theoretical basis of Marxism itself must be reconsidered in order to address the issue of ethics (Mahler 1965). This clearly shows the limits of how far intellectual engagement with the problems of subjectivity could go in integrating the existentialist challenge to Marxism, and indeed, to our knowledge no strong arguments for revising Marxism on the basis of existentialism were put forward in Romania at that time.

Nevertheless, the study of Sartre’s thought was at its height toward the end of the 1960s. In a 1968 article on Sartre and Marxism, Magda Stroe offered a complex overview of his philosophy and politics. Stroe taught Marxist philosophy at the Institute of Fine Arts in Bucharest from 1955–1956 and was particularly interested in esthetics. In 1975 she defended her doctoral dissertation on Sartre’s esthetics, parts of which were published in Revista de filozofie in the second half of the 1970s (Stroe 2009). In her 1968 article, which was the first detailed account of Sartre’s philosophy and politics up to The Critique of Dialectical Reason, Stroe grappled with the issue of whether Sartre’s intellectual evolution should be seen as a rupture (following Merleau-Ponty) or as continuity (Simone de Beauvoire’s position in “Merleau-Ponty et le pseudo-sartrisme”). This was the starting point for a detailed survey of Sartre’s work and ideological positions, from his renunciation of socialism in 1939 to his understanding of socialism as a “human project” in 1946, as an “absolute frame of reference for the appreciation of the political act” in 1957, and finally his 1966 self-identification as a “Marxist and communist” (Stroe 1968, p. 148). At the level of his theorization of existence as “situated,” Stroe acknowledged his “persistent efforts to avoid subjectivism, irrationalism, [and] indeterminism,” pointing out that through his “theory of the situation, Sartre attempts to limit the absolute voluntarity of choice and to show that choice is not realized in a void but in reality.” Stroe even claimed that “L’Être et le Néant reveals the existence of some positive moments in Sartre’s thought” and that “although he pays tribute to idealism and metaphysics, he points to real problems: the importance of subjectivity, choice, and commitment” (Stroe 1968, p. 149). However, Stroe saw the most important transformation as coming from Sartre’s political experience, which led him, in his 1952 Les communistes et la paix, to recognize “the need to organize the working class into a party” (Stroe 1968, p. 154). In Stroe’s view, this was a very legitimate stand that distinguished Sartre’s development from that of Camus and Merleau-Ponty, with whom he shared a common position in 1945. Camus, Stroe explained, “did not overcome the stage of abstract negation of capitalism” and Merleau-Ponty “lapsed into skepticism and reformism” (Stroe 1968, p. 155).

In reorganizing the local Marxist perspective on Sartre’s work and activity, Stroe also applied the concept of praxis to the “dialectical unity between the objective and the subjective.” She concluded that Sartre’s philosophy maintained an unresolved internal contradiction between phenomenology/existentialism and an anti-subjectivist, anti-irrational current, but that the latter had absorbed or at the very least hybridized the other. In the same issue of Revista de filozofie, Ana Katz reflected on the relationship between existentialism and Marxism in Sartre’s thought through the lens of his approach to freedom. Katz came to a similar, though perhaps more blunt, conclusion as Stroe, who started with an open mind that there is neither only rupture nor only continuity in the development of Sartre’s thought. “Despite all these real connections to Marxism,” Katz argued after examining his work and politics similarly to Stroe, “Sartre is no Marxist. But neither is he an existentialist among existentialists. […] Rather, we can say […] that he is an existentialist among Marxists, that he has found a solid foundation of human solidarity on the path of class struggle, but that he has not yet completed it” (Katz 1968, p. 169).

The consolidation of this cautiously benevolent view of Sartre and existentialism toward the end of the 1960s was marked, as earlier, by an article that Gulian authored. Writing on existentialism and axiology in 1968, he acknowledged the historical, objective justification of existentialism, positively assessed the move by authors such as Sartre and Camus from existentialist problematization to action, and argued that existentialism’s contribution to human knowledge was meaningful and that, in particular, its critical analysis of human limitations could be integrated into a dialectical anthropology. Gulian saw in existentialism both an antidote to the naïve optimism of humanism and rationalism, and a “hidden axiology”: through despair, doubt, withdrawal, and loneliness, existentialism in fact indirectly expressed a striving for participation in life understood as a realm of values (Gulian 1968, p. 1415). With the explicit exception of Heidegger, Gulian held that existentialism, like psychology (be it Adler or Freud) or sociology, were legitimate ways of exploring the real conditionings of human existence. “What is important, however, are not the conditionings, but what man can do in spite of these conditionings,” he concluded, “therefore the existential problem leads us to the problem of values” (Gulian 1968, p. 1417; italics in original). Both Gulian and Stroe emphasized the same aspect: that the only recoverable aspect of subjectivity is the situated condition of experience. This was also expressed in Ana Katz’s assessment that “like Marx, who claimed that misery becomes even more unbearable through the recognition of misery,” Sartre saw that acknowledging the problem made the problem unbearable.

Existentialists without existentialism: Between a Marxist philosophical anthropology and the fragmentation of disciplines in the 1970s

The quantitative analysis of the occurrences of the term “existentialism” (including variants) and the mentions of the main existentialist authors in Cercetări filozofice and Revista de filozofie showed an unusual desynchronization. Sartre was the first author to be drawn into debates about existentialism, especially from the early 1960s onward, and he was thus the first to be reread through an existentialist revisionist lens by Magda Stroe, Ana Katz, and C. I. Gulian toward the end of the decade. After a long period in which “existentialism” had almost disappeared from Revista de filozofie compared to its peaks in the early and late 1960s (see the 1969–1977 period in Graph 2), the term regained prominence in 1978. Yet this came with an unusual twist: it was completely disconnected from Sartre’s ideas and writings. A similar desynchronization had occurred earlier, when Edmund Husserl was heavily criticized in the journal in 1960, but the number of mentions of “existentialism” did not increase until 1961, when Sartre was drawn into the debate. The same happened in 1965 and 1967, when “Husserl” was mentioned frequently, yet “existentialism” did not come into discussion. In 1968, it was “Sartre” once again who drove the occurrences of “existentialism” up. However, after that “Sartre” lost his connection to “existentialism,” as the graph shows most notably in 1979, when he is mentioned frequently, but “existentialism” is not. After 1978, when the number of mentions of “existentialism” declined, mentions of “Sartre” increased in 1979, of “Heidegger” in 1983 and 1987, and of “Husserl” in 1986 which, in contrast to the early socialist period, leads us to describe the 1970s and 1980s as a period of existentialists without existentialism. What had happened?

Graph 2
figure 2

“Existentialism” and “Sartre,” “Husserl,” and “Heidegger” in \(CF\) and RdF (1954–1989)Footnote

To understand the proportions of these occurrences, here are the main findings of our quantitative inquiry: Marx – 40 500; Hegel – 10 700; Kant – 7600; Sartre – 1250; Husserl – 1560; Heidegger – 1550; Kierkegaard – 220; Merleau-Ponty – 210; Camus – 230; Beauvoir – 55. This is also why we list only the results for “Sartre,” “Husserl,” and “Heidegger.”

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Once again, C. I. Gulian’s attitude was crucial to the way the official philosophical establishment as represented by the main philosophical journal dealt with existentialism. After a decade of criticizing existentialism for its irrationalism, and a decade of grappling with Sartre’s mediation between existentialism and Marxism, the 1970s witnessed an attempt to develop a specifically Marxist approach to the central problem of the situated human existence that was brought to the fore by all existentialist authors. Following up on his earlier writings on philosophical anthropology, in a 1971 article Gulian acknowledged the role of contemporary existentialism in drawing attention to “the importance of the situation for anthropology,” yet nevertheless maintained that existentialist analysis retained its “abstract-metaphysical, ahistorical, and incomplete character” (Gulian 1971, p. 719). The Marxist philosophical anthropology that Gulian proposed went beyond existentialism’s recognition of situatedness (which he conceded even in the case of Heidegger, because of his discussion of temporality). It also integrated the insights of contemporary sociology and psychology, but not their drawbacks (in particular, the focus of functionalism on social integration or the reduction of social issues to individual psychology). Importantly, Gulian also distinguished philosophical anthropology from revisionist Marxism, albeit not explicitly, but by arguing that the most important existential relationship was that between man and being (Sein understood in a neutral ontological, not metaphysical, sense) and not that between individual and collectivity (Gulian 1971, pp. 723–724), the core of Marxist humanist discourse at this time in Romania (Hîncu 2022). The intellectual genealogy of philosophical anthropology thus understood went back to Marx and Engels and led to an examination of the ways in which people’s capacity for self-affirmation was sociohistorically determined, as were existential attitudes. This approach to situatedness, Gulian maintained, succeeded in overcoming the internal contradiction that persisted even in the existentialist thought most consistent with Marxist dialectics (Jasper and Sartre in particular): the contradiction between the claim that man is fully determined and that man is fully self-determined. Marxist philosophical anthropology did so “through analysis: the analysis of what, how much, and how the historical situation determines man from its depth” (Gulian 1971, p. 729; italics in original).

In 1972, Gulian offered a detailed definition of Marxist philosophical anthropology in relation to various philosophical approaches. Against Marxist authors who deemed philosophical anthropology a “bourgeois” invention,Footnote 10 he claimed that philosophical anthropology was an integral part of Marxist philosophy, especially in its focus on the historical materialist analysis of values and in its use of dialectics as a method (Gulian 1972b, p. 197). Gulian grounded Marxist philosophical anthropology in certain sciences examining the biological-psychological and sociohistorical structures that determined man without “annihilating freedom of choice.” In so doing, he argued that it “opposes the existentialist conceptions that seek to anchor philosophical anthropology ‘beyond’ the particular sciences.” Finally, Gulian distinguished Marxist philosophical anthropology from structuralism, or what he identified as Althusser’s “theoretical anti-humanism” (on the reception of structuralism in Revista de filozofie more broadly, see Baghiu 2021). Gulian maintained that structuralism sought to eliminate the issues of meaning and values, whereas philosophical anthropology approached man both ontologically and axiologically, theoretically and practically, in order to know man as much as to change him (Gulian 1972b, p. 198).

Marxist anthropological philosophy was certainly not exclusively a project of Gulian’s. In fact, a series of colloquia on philosophical anthropology had taken place in Moscow (1969), Bucharest (1970), and Sofia (1971) as part of a collaboration between the institutes of philosophy in the three countries. Revista de filozofie published translations of several Bulgarian and Soviet lectures on all three occasions. The 1969 editorial introducing them expressed the hope that future meetings would go beyond discussions of the theoretical nature of philosophical anthropology and address the fundamental contemporary issues of man (O.C. 1970, p. 60). Given the intransigent tone of the Bulgarian and Soviet contributions to the 1969 meeting, it is indeed possible that Gulian had his counterparts in mind when he argued against criticizing philosophical anthropology as “bourgeois.” However, a year later in Bucharest, Soviet philosopher B. T. Grigorian articulated a view of existentialism similar to Gulian’s, acknowledging the positive preoccupation of “subjectivist philosophy” with the alienation of man but arguing that it left unresolved the contradiction between the objective and subjective (Grigorian 1971). If there was some convergence among philosophers from the three countries, the third and final meeting of the colloquium, held in Sofia, showed that beyond mutual introductions to each other’s research agendas, there was no attempt to articulate a coherent common approach to Marxist philosophical anthropology (see Redacţia 1972, pp. 201–202; and following articles).

In terms of “institutionalized philosophy,” as throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Gulian’s work played the role of redrawing the boundaries to which Marxist–Leninist philosophy could be stretched, in terms of engaging with Western literature for local theory building. His agenda for philosophical anthropology was never taken up, but his approach to existentialism in particular set a precedent for disentangling existentialist authors from existentialism as a philosophical approach to be challenged. Gulian took what he needed from the critique of Sartre’s existentialism, and although he rescued the concept of situation from his thinking, he separated it from Sartre’s thought. So did Haralamb Culea’s 1973 article on “Directions in the epistemological foundation of sociology,” in which the philosopher involved in empirical sociological research maintained that “sociology has a considerable number of theories that can play a heuristic role […] [and in which] results can also be seen in research supported by psychologistic, relationist, noological, phenomenological, existentialist, [and] historicist theories” (Culea 1973, p. 1016). In our reading, this indicates a timid struggle to create an interdisciplinary debate about the possible role of philosophy in the context of the disciplinary atomization of social sciences and humanities, both in the West and increasingly under state socialism as well. With the rise of cultural studies and cultural anthropology in Western academia, Eastern counterparts found it difficult to keep the domain compact, so that the use of philosophical concepts in new contexts (sociology, philosophical anthropology, literary studies, theory of science, etc.) became rather intuitive.

Toward the end of the 1970s, Revista de filozofie published several articles dedicated to individual authors, such as Gulian’s consideration of Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics and its relation to structuralism (Gulian 1978a), Alexandru Boboc’s article on Heideggerian ontology (Boboc 1978), or Gulian’s interpretation of Husserl’s Lebenswelt as a “return to praxis” (Gulian 1978b). All philosophers who were considered existentialists in the 1960s and 1970s were now stripped of their existentialist label and discussed in various debates; whereas existentialism was no longer singled out, but generally mentioned alongside many other philosophical orientations. This was due to the increasing professionalization and fragmentation of philosophy and the rise of cultural studies, where the tools created in the late 1960s and early 1970s inspired new interpretations of dialectical and historical materialism, and eventually the decentering of materialism altogether in favor of other philosophical preoccupations. This is illustrated by the translations from Western philosophy into Romanian in the 1970s and 1980s, which were mostly concerned with epistemology, philosophy of science, logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and consciousness, and artificial intelligence (on analytical philosophy, see Pârvu 2014; for the case study of the prolific translator Mihail Radu Solcan, see Vică forthcoming).

The move can also be observed in the evolution of textbooks on dialectical and historical materialism from the 1950s to the 1980s, as Alex Cistelecan argued convincingly (Cistelecan 2021, 2022). In what concerns existentialism, the textbooks show an evolution broadly comparable with the one discussed in this paper. The historical materialism textbook published in 1961 contained a separate chapter on the critique of contemporary bourgeois sociology, with a subchapter on its “existentialist and pragmatist strands” (Curs de materialism 1961). Several years later, in 1967, a chapter on “currents and directions in contemporary sociological thought” included subchapters on “psychologism,” empiricism, structuralism and functionalism, and “technocratism” and the sociology of industrial society, but no longer a subchapter on existentialism. Instead, an entire chapter was dedicated to the topic of “man in contemporary society,” and covered pre-Marxist, Marxist, and non-Marxist conceptions of man and human essence, and a discussion of socialist humanism and the development of personality (Materialism istoric 1967), highlighting the rising centrality of humanism as a Marxist philosophical concern. The textbooks published over the 1970s rather became a collection of thematic discussions on a variety of topics, with little indication of an overarching framework and little pretense at exhaustive or systematic mapping of the philosophical field: e.g., the object of philosophy, materialism, structure and system, determinism, development and progress, knowledge and truth, action, etc. (Filozofie 1975). Finally, there were almost no new textbooks on dialectical and historical materialism in the 1980s.

In the 1980s, existentialism also became a useful tool to explain how interwar Romanian philosophy could be reread in a useful manner with the rebirth of nationalism and the partial recovery of the interwar cultural tradition previously deemed idealist, bourgeois, or irrationalist. A good example of this is the philosophical work of Lucian Blaga. In 1985, Dumitru Matei wrote an article titled “Lucian Blaga on the ‘philosophical consciousness,’’’ in which he claimed that the Romanian philosopher’s “metaphysical coordinates” were preexistentialist. In 1989, Teodor Dima also argued that Lucian Blaga’s concept of “Luciferic knowledge” could be seen as a form of atheistic metaphysics: “in our century, irrationalism—through the so-called dialectical theology and through religious existentialism—strives to modernize religion through a return to its old meaning, the mystical one” (Dima 1989, p. 152). On the occasion of philosopher Mircea Florian’s 100th birthday in 1988, existentialism, when analyzed as an important part of Florian’s work, was seen as a phenomenon “triggered by the fundamentally human desire to offer the way to a more adequate knowledge of the human being, to be a questioning through which man can become himself again” (Ghis̨e 1988, p. 361).

To conclude our analysis of the integration of existentialism beyond purely polemical engagement in studies featured in Revista de filozofie in the 1970s, we would like to point out a conjectural error in our quantitative representation in Graph 2, which nevertheless supports our analysis of the 1970s as a time of existentialists without existentialism: although it may appear that “Heidegger” and “existentialism” are strongly linked in the journal at the end of the decade, the increase is in fact coincidental. 1978 was the year of Heidegger’s death, which explains the spike in his mentions, but most of the references to “existentialism” came from a survey of contemporary debates on existentialism by N. I. Maris̨. His article brings us to the conclusions of our own overview of the reception of existentialism in Socialist Romania.

Conclusions

Comprehensive, but not polemical, Mariş’s article grappled not only with the proliferation of existentialist literature but also with the attempts to define it in both Western and Marxist scholarship. It concluded with a definition of existentialism that can also be read as a recapitulation of the stages through which the reception of existentialism went in Socialist Romania:

Existentialism must be considered as an idealistic philosophical current of subjectivist-irrationalist orientation, which emerged as a direct consequence of the complex situation created before the Second World War through the works of Heidegger, Jaspers, Sartre, G. Marcel, [and] N. Abbagnano. Later, it experienced a wide audience and a further development in contemporary thought. Existentialism deals with a variety of themes discussed in specific ways: the contingency of human existence, “throwing it away” and giving it up, “choice,” freedom, the powerlessness of reason, transcendence, the absurd, loneliness, the fragility of human existence, nothingness, etc. (Maris̨ 1978, p. 623)

In the 1950s, there was a highly confrontational and divisive perspective on existentialism, rooted in the critique of the interwar period and of bourgeois philosophy from Romania as well as from the capitalist West. In the 1960s, this approach to existentialism without existentialists was replaced by a closer examination of the development of existentialist thought in relation to Marxism, especially in the works of Sartre. Some of the most important concepts of existentialism, such as the situation, freedom, or choice, were increasingly integrated into Marxist analyses of the human condition in the 1970s. Although the project of a “Marxist philosophical anthropology” did not bear fruit, it again detached existentialism from existentialists, so that by the end of the decade, existentialist authors were being discussed in various fields and debates, but no longer in relation to existentialism as a philosophical current with which to contend. As national ideology gained pride of place in cultural debates in the 1980s, the main discussions in philosophy also shifted decisively from Marxism’s intense engagement with bourgeois philosophy until at least the early 1970s. Finally, the integration of existentialism in local debates through exegeses rather than mere polemics also made it possible to partially rehabilitate authors from the interwar period previously deemed “irrationalists” by identifying existentialist themes or tendencies within their work

Our analysis of the reception of existentialism has several implications for understanding intellectual thought in Socialist Romania. First, it has shown that the period of the 1950s, although couched in very divisive rhetoric, was nonetheless broader in scope than an analysis focusing exclusively on the Sovietization of the cultural sphere would allow. On the one hand, it was broader in chronological terms, as the critique of existentialism was deeply rooted in the critique of the interwar period and philosophy’s role in supporting the existing sociopolitical order, the extreme right, and war. On the other hand, the engagement with existentialism drew on a host of sources from the capitalist West, state socialist Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union, and occasionally from the Global South. Second, we argue that the engagement of the official philosophical establishment with the work of Sartre, with its ups and downs, should be seen in a broader context of postwar contestation and integration of intellectual thought originating in the Western core. Romanian philosophers’ cautious approach to Sartre in the 1960s was not only a sign of relative conservatism, but also a consequence of the Romanian actors’ positioning in relation to their Western Marxist counterparts and their Eastern European peers in events such as the 1964 Gramsci Institute colloquium or the academic cooperation in the field of philosophical anthropology between Bulgaria, Romania, and the Soviet Union in 1969–1971. The figure of C. I. Gulian, as editor-in-chief of the main philosophical journal, is central to understanding how the boundaries of benevolent acceptance and the agenda of Marxist theorization of existentialist themes were drawn within institutionalized philosophical thought. A comparative analysis of Revista de filozofie and other major cultural journals of the period, which is beyond the scope of this paper, could answer the question of the extent to which the lines of demarcation drawn here resonated beyond the official philosophical field. Finally, the way in which in the 1970s existentialist authors were delinked from existentialism as a philosophical strand of thought that required critical positioning points to the broader consequences of the failure of Marxist theory to reliably integrate its “others” under state socialism. As can be seen in the case of anthropological philosophy, the attempt to integrate key existentialist concepts led not to broader investment of the cultural field in a Marxist theory of man, as hoped, but to the appropriation of existentialist authors for debates that went beyond philosophy, to the disciplines of humanities and social science that had split off from the overarching Marxist–Leninist philosophical paradigm. This raises important questions about the role of the official philosophical establishment in managing intellectual plurality, not only by keeping it in check but also by providing precedents for a more “dialogical” engagement with non-Marxist scholars.