The book title is a direct allusion to Robert Bolt's play "A Man for All Seasons". It refers to an idea discussed in previous works, that of Romania's special case: Stalinism preserved after the death of Joseph Stalin, and returning in full swing during the Ceauşescu years. Noting the role played by party purges in this process, Cioroianu stresses: "Tismăneanu was the first to ever suggest that between the communists of the '30s and those of the '60s one could hardly determine a correspondence, even if the names of some—the lucky ones!—crop up from one period and into the other." Ion Bogdan Lefter notes that it is "paradoxical—in that it is the first American book that Vladimir Tismăneanu dedicated to the subject he was most familiar with." Lefter writes that the idea of "perpetual Romanian Stalinism" is backed by "a weighty demonstration", but is reserved toward the statements according to which Ceaușescu's early "small liberalization" of the 1960s was inconsequential, arguing that, even though "Re-Stalinization" occurred with the "April Theses" of 1971, "regime could never overturn phenomenon altogether, some of its effects being preserved—at least in part—until 1989." Lefter proposes a more in-depth analysis of this situation, based on the methodology of historiography introduced by the Annales School, which, he argues, would allow more room for "small personal histories".