That which opposes a "diseased" modernity is not a pre-modern factual state - particularly, the habitual world of peasant societies - but a critical modern perspective, an alternative modernity to which its own rationality pattern can be applied, one which we could name a prospective-retrospective pattern (Mihăilescu, 2003): as would say "the friends of the museum", this sui generis rationality "makes experiments with the past" in a "polemic gesture concerning the present,? which aims at "healing" this present. It is a critical modernity for which a paradoxical name was found: a conservative revolution - or, more simply, conservative thought, which, outside and beyond the subjective area, wants to be a well-tempered rationality, a "compromise" between the habitual fixed structure of retrospective rationality and the perilous enthusiastic acts of prospective rationality: "Between the rigid lack of horizon and the macabre passion of hasty modernity," argues Ioan Stanomir, reiterating Virgil Nemoianu's thought about conservatism--the policy of delay brings to the horizon of the community's behavior a caution which offers the necessary lapse of time for discovering the valid elements of secular heritage. Retrospection is a shortcut to the heart of today's world. The conscience of the existence of a patrimony reorders contextually the dilemmas of the globalization fin-de-siecle." (Stanomir, 2004:114).

The symptoms of the "disease" identified in this contemporary world, which wants to be healed by such a conservative ideology bear different names, from the artificialism invoked by Tonnies, to the relativism blamed by "the friends of the Romanian Peasant Museum."[8] Its etiology seems to be governed by (relative) consensus: the drift of in-dependent modern man, detached from the heteronomy that kept him bound to an exterior and "active principle," while feeding him these higher and mutual senses. It is the theme of "tradition" and of continuity, seen as opposed to "revolution," which is central for conservative thought, in general, expressed in Romanian conservative thought by the recurrent theme of "organic development." About this theme, Horia Patapievici stated the following: "obviously, the model of synchronization through imitation (Lovinescu, n.n.) is inferior to that proposed by Titu Maiorescu in his "theory of shapes without content" (Patapievici, 2004:89).

Where does the Romanian Peasant Museum place itself in this ideological landscape?