ABSTRACT
The chapter takes aim at the core of Marxist orthodoxy under state socialism, by analyzing the evolution of the official handbooks and courses of dialectical materialism and historical materialism in communist Romania. After briefly sketching the Marxian origins and the Soviet mediations of what came to be designated as ‘dialectical materialism’ and ‘historical materialism’, it traces the paths of evolution from the 1950s to the 1980s of these two institutionalized discourses in communist Romania, in a parallel journey which describes two paths of “de-Marxization,” similar in outcome, yet different in their respective dynamics and configuration.
