Roots of Romanticism

In these lectures, originally delivered at Washington, D.C.'s National Gallery of Art in 1965, acclaimed historian of philosophy Isaiah Berlin addresses the origins of what he deems "the greatest single shift in the consciousness of the West that has occurred." His focus, apart from some digressions into Montesquieu, Hume, and Rousseau, is on the German philosophers of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and he runs through the contributions of Herder, Kant, Schiller, Fichte, Schlegel, and others in turn. He also shows how romanticism would later influence both the existentialists and the fascists, but paradoxically have its greatest influence upon the emergence of a liberalism that seems at complete odds with the romantic sensibility. Berlin's tone is informed but rarely obtuse, making The Roots of Romanticism as fun to read as it must have been to hear him deliver spoken.
In this posthumous volume, the British philosopher and historian of ideas quickly establishes his theory that GermanyAnot England or FranceAwas the birthplace of the romantic movement. A sense of provincial insignificance and ressentiment against the sophistication, prestige and military power of the French underwrote the movement's birth, he contends. Still, the territory covered by "Romanticism" seems so vast as to be contradictory, containing both "primitivism" and "dandyism," the worship both of the noble savage's simplicity and of "red waistcoats, blue hair, green wigs, absinthe, death, [and] suicide." While others have, understandably, thrown up their hands at the idea of uniting such disparate enthusiasms, Berlin sees contradiction itself as central to romanticism's legacy. Before romanticism, he argues, people believed that for any question there should be only one right answer, however difficult to discern. To a romantic, all beliefs, however incompatible, can be admired if they are held with real convictionAa notion from which both relativism and pluralism (like Berlin's own) are born. Further, the romantics sought to free the human will from all constraints: "the attempt to blow up and explode the very notion of a stable structure of anything," he asserts, is "the deepest and in a sense the most insane [element] in this extremely valuable and important movement." As if in illustration of the romantics' own principle, Berlin, despite his belief that the movement's ideals ultimately become dangerous, nonetheless gets inside the minds of the thinkers he analyzesAHerder, Kant, SchillerAand presents their ideas persuasively. Written for a lecture series in the early '60s and not originally intended as a book (Hardy is to be commended for a masterful editing job), Berlin's work here transcends these limits. It is thoroughly brilliant, often thrilling and yet always accessible.