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The paper explores the merits of Protagoras' view of politics as a possible intellectual source of the post-communist theory of democracy. Unbeknownst to themselves, Romanian politicians and political scientist tend to understand the function of politics in the footsteps of Plato and Lenin, as an art, or science of leadership. Interested mainly in the effectiveness of government, they give no significant heed to the issue of rights and liberties. The great discourse of Protagoras of Abdera could supply, in a normative way, the conceptual tools for a different approach to politics, as a pedagogical rhetoric of legal and political equality.

The study focuses on the analysis of a minor literature selection. My application, being determined by the nature of the selected theme (the major historical literature, which offers important interpretative reference points, usually does not appeal to the repertory characteristic of the historiographic and mythologizing imagery), is also conditioned by a personal concern pertaining to the resurgence, in recent years, of this type of imagery that usually affects the perception of historicity as well as the structuring of civil society. The themes of postcommunist Dacianism represent a thin catalog of theories and motives, which primarily aim to the reinvention of the traditional historiographic discourse through the reinterpretation of the older or more recent archaeological discoveries from a Dacianist perspective. The anti-Semitic themes from the post-communist discourse disseminated especially in connection to the instauration of the communist regime in Romania, are connected to the new radicalisms as well. Publishers that promote nationalist, xenophobic, anti-Semitic, and fictional along with historical Dacianist literature are also responsible for the dissemination of extremist ideas using Dacianist rhetoric. This minor literature, ignored by the academic establishment, but benefiting from a large segment of culture consumers, has had appeal especially among adolescents attracted by the soteriological profile of Dacian heroes. The influence of texts can be explained by the manner in which major themes of the national historical discourse are vulgarized and reinterpreted from the perspective of some rhetoric of crises. The search for heroes in an ancient and hypothetical "golden age" (we refer to the Pelasgic Empire) is part of the already obsolete repertoire of mythological reconstructions. The refuge in the past (in fact, a sign of maladjustment and the inability for social and identitary reformulation) and sacrifice become the reference points for the socio-cultural behavior proposed in a world, which is considered hostile and conspiring. Anti-Semitic attitudes go hand in hand with the instances of identitary exacerbation produced on the traditional basis of victimology, on the Orthodoxist-Dacianist exaltations. We cannot but to be astonished by the nationalist mixture, which paradoxically combine Dacianism and Orthodoxism, or Dacianism and alternative religions, the latter occurrence being also violently anti-Semitic through its rejection of Judaism as a subversive and unilateral religion. In conclusion, post-communist Dacianism (promoted especially by the Dacia Revival International Society ), as an answer to the identitary crisis, fits into the autochtonist historiographic trend, while more radical approaches (see the extremist publications and the books recently published especially by the "Obiectiv" Publishing House from Craiova) are somehow closely related to both the "interwar prophetism", which they vulgarize, and to the legionary mystique too.

The article questions, in a sceptical and prospective way, the institutional outcomes of this major trans-national trend of administrative reformism known as "New Public Management". In our view, the main cross-border legacy of the process of acclimatizing NPM precepts and recipes to various national configurations consists essentially in institutional rearrangements and in a repertoire of managerial tools and recipes, embedded into different institutional orders and hybridized with many other key features of various administrative cultures. Backing up major administrative reforms started several decades ago, the NPM rhetoric claimed to furnish the universal cure for the "bureaucratic" disease which was supposedly affecting the developed states at the end of the 1970s. From then on and although it never acquired the inner coherence of a real doctrine, it spread all over the world at the point of becoming both a "policy paradigm" and a "praxeologic". However, once implemented and in order to endure, the NPM-inspired logics, instruments and methods have fatally begun to suffer a process of routinisation which transformed them significantly. Hence, far from achieving their initial goal of "de-bureaucratizing" the state, NPM reformism became part of the endless processes of bureaucratic reproduction inescapably affecting modern states and ensuring their resilience.

International audience ; The article questions, in a skeptical and prospective way, the institutional outcomes of this major trans-national trend of administrative reformism known as "New Public Management". In our view, the main cross-border legacy of the process of acclimatizing NPM precepts and recipes to various national configurations consists essentially in institutional rearrangements and in a repertoire of managerial tools and recipes, embedded into different institutional orders and hybridized with many other key features of various administrative cultures. Backing up major administrative reforms started several decades ago, the NPM rhetoric claimed to furnish the universal cure for the "bureaucratic" disease which was supposedly affecting the developed states at the end of the 1970s. From then on and although it never acquired the inner coherence of a real doctrine, it spread all over the world at the point of becoming both a "policy paradigm" and a "praxeologic". However, once implemented and in order to endure, the NPM-inspired logics, instruments, and methods have fatally begun to suffer a process of routinization which transformed them significantly. Hence, far from achieving their initial goal of "de-bureaucratizing" the state, NPM reformism became part of the endless processes of bureaucratic reproduction inescapably affecting modern states and ensuring their resilience.