 Initially a conservative, he became active inside the newly created National Peasants' Party towards the end of the 1920s, and adapted the group's advocacy of a peasant state that would favour small-scale agricultural property (an echo of Poporanism), while taking a more centrist stand than his friend Madgearu.A member of the party's Study Circle, he took part in drafting a new party program (a 1935 initiative taken by Ion Mihalache and Mihai Ralea, it also involved the left-wingers Ernest Ene, Mihail Ghelmegeanu, and Petre Andrei).It was at this time that his ideas on ethnicity ("Romanianism") came to be debated by various figures on the Right, and were the subject of virulent criticism from intellectuals sympathetic to the fascist Iron Guard, who notably rejected his commitment to secularism and Maiorescu's "Junimea" tradition (Mircea Vulcănescu spoke against "his hostile attitude, shared by his "Junimist" colleagues, against the penetration of a new, religious spirit, inside the University [of Bucharest]"), as well as from the nationalist modernist Lucian Blaga.