The Romantic Revolution: A History (Modern Library Chronicles) Paperback – August 14, 2012

"Every age has its own social context, its own intellectual climate, and takes it for granted, as we take ours. Because it was taken for granted, it is not explicitly expressed in the documents of the time: it has to be deduced and reconstructed." (p.125) Tim Blanning's overarching strength as a historian is his ability to provide readers with this culture and climate, as his approving quote of Hugh Trevor-Roper above.In this superb introduction to the Romantic Movement, Blanning carries the reader from its earliest intimations, with Rousseau's rejection of the Enlightenment's philosophes and the cult of Rationalism with his own cult of the individual, through his disciples in Germany such as Goethe and Herder, then up to England and the Romantic poets. Art, music and literature are represented and the latter part of the books touches upon the work of various artists in different media. The second section of the book, after the first lays out the historical background, explores the dark unconscious of Romanticism including dreams, madness and the heroes and anti-heroes of the movement. The third section deals with the idea of language being representational of a national identity, the "rediscovery" of history and the use of myth.Blanning has to be one of the most readable historians writing today, as his majestic The Pursuit of Glory proves, and he is clearly familiar with both the primary and secondary sources of this period. Thus his seemingly effortless synthesis of materials is readily explained. And as the Modern Library Chronicles series forces its authors to be succinct, there are no longuers in this history and occasional flashes of wit. (Investigating the origin of the phrase "art for art's sake", Blanning concludes "this was a German idea, turned into a slogan by an Englishman and recorded by a Frenchman"). (p.47)There are few faults to be found. While Blanning categorizes certain composers as Romantic, he never fully explains what makes their music so. And his coverage of various writers and painters can appear arbitrary. But his strengths far outweigh any quibbles and he has written an entertaining, brief and very informed book.

The Enlightenment holds much power in the imagination of the Western mind. Due to the significance of Whig Historiography (still prominent in Western, liberal, academic scholarship) that promoted the historical view that individualism, science, reason, capitalism, and industrialization constitute “modernization” and progress, nearly everyone wants to claim a lineage with the Enlightenment. However, the Enlightenment produced side-effects that influence contemporary discourse and modernity—the degradation of nature, the alienation of humanity through labor and nature, and the “death of God” insofar that the mystical view of God from the Middle Ages was reduced to God being a faraway author of “Natural Law” that he does not violate (hence the lack of miracles), at best (Newton, Descartes, Leibniz’s view of God), or that God did not exist (at worst). In response to these effects of the Enlightenment arose the Romantic Movement, a collection of philosophers, artists, and literary critics (literature authors) who vehemently opposed the Enlightenment project.We have been told that the Enlightenment shaped modernity (thanks to Whig Historiography). This is simply not true, and ever since the early 1900s, and especially post-war (1945), the Western Academy has rediscovered the tremendous impact of Romanticism upon modernity as well. In politics, Romanticism has a negative connotation because many scholars have asserted that politicized Romanticism led to the totalitarian movements of the early twentieth century (this scholarship has been promoted by titans in philosophy and history like Isaiah Berlin, Hannah Arendt, Karl Popper, Norman Cohn, and more recently by Paul Berman). However, Tim Blanning doesn’t look at Romanticism’s political impact, as much as he looks at the art, culture, and literature of the Romantic movement and how it influenced modernity and modern thinking.The story starts with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, sometimes viewed as an Enlightenment philosopher in high school history books, but widely viewed as the father of Romanticism and the Counter Enlightenment in university studies and scholarship. Rousseau, as Blanning notes, broke with the Enlightenment on many key areas. Rousseau favored passion and emotion over reason, he favored the rule of the public over the enlightened experts (the proletariat over the technocrats), and he also attempted to re-enchant the world with a mixture of conservative Christian theology and Pagan-esque Pantheism (Christian Pantheism) in response to the increasingly secularized and disenchanted religious and theological worldview produced by the Enlightenment. (In fact, “Liberal Christianity,” as championed by people like Friedrich Schleiermacher, is not Christianity merged with the Enlightenment—that is Reformed Epistemology and the very mechanistic and deterministic theologies of Reformed Calvinism, the Puritans, and theological writings of Isaac Newton—it is Christianity merged with Romanticism: all about inward passion, spiritual (inwardly) experience, and the view that God is with nature.) Rousseau also extols, in his literary works, ideas of romantic love and childhood innocence. He found a widespread audience among lowly aristocrats who were upset with their lack of upward mobility and erosion of the world they knew.Rousseau serves for Romanticism, the same importance Moses does for the Hebrews. Rousseau, like Moses, is a revolutionary prophet and leader who inaugurates a new age for the disposed and oppressed. Rousseau’s political tracts influenced Karl Marx while his philosophical and literary tracts influenced people from Immanuel Kant to Wolfgang von Goethe. Rousseau, a Swiss-born French philosopher, became the progenitor of the “Sturm und Drang” (Storm and Stress) movement in literature, music, and the arts in Germany, as well as being important in the rise of Immanuel Kant’s career (therefore, it can be said that Rousseau is the father of German Idealism too!). Blanning recreates the artistic and literary culture of the Romantics. The “Sturm und Drang” Movement in Germany emphasized emotion, passion, loud noises, an imagination in their work as a musical and literary revolt against cold and sterile reason.Romantic literature was obsessed with the notions of passion, emotion, love, and inwardness. Romantic poets demonized the industrial revolution and Enlightenment science as leading to alienation, mechanization, and material exploitation. Likewise, the necessity for innocence is a common theme in Romantic literature.Romantic artwork rebelled against the neoclassicism of the Renaissance in favor of a new creation of the Medieval Gothic. The Romantics saw imitation (the prevailing neoclassical form of art, copying the works of the classical period of Ancient Greece and Rome) as cheap. The Romantics produced something much more radical, the idea that artwork can, and should, be created ex nihilo. Art should be a creative endeavor, and harkened back to reconnect man with God (insofar that God creates, man can create to grow closer to God). This is why Romantic artwork is so beautiful. The colors, textures, and landscapes are meant to elucidate an emotional and passionate response that drives human action, unlike the neoclassical art that was meant to cause rational inquiry (again, this is Romanticism’s rebellion against rationalism).Blanning then moves into the framework of the Romantic mind and how Romantics saw reason, industrialization, and urbanization as destroying the delicate balance between humanity and nature. This was the nightmare of the Romantics—that humanity would not only grow alienated from the world, but through industrial capitalism, they would grow alienated from each other.Likewise, Blanning moves into the importance of myth and language to the Romantics. The Romantics were so violently opposed to the present modernity, that they created imaginative worlds of the past: the Middle Ages, ancient history (the Pagans, Aryans, Norse), and even the “State of Nature” (Rousseau’s view that primitive man lived in an Edenic-like paradise until they “fell” with the inversion of reason, “The Tree of Knowledge”). Through language, literature, and artwork, the Romantics created an imaginary world that captured the imagination of their audiences. Folktales, folk art, and fantastical stories of dragons, goblins, trolls, knights with shiny armor rescuing the damsel in distress were all inventions of Romanticism—all of which terribly twisted the reality of ancient history (the Knights of the Middle Ages, for instance, far from being the heroic nobles of literature, were essentially the mafia of the Medieval Period, thugs on horseback who terrorized the peasants).Blanning finishes with a careful consideration of how Romanticism transcends the Left-Right political paradigm. Conservatives and Revolutionaries, those who opposed the Ancien Regime and those who favored it, were all children of Romanticism. He notes that Romanticism influenced the development of modernity more than people realize, or have been told. Our modern ideas of love, passion, emotion, creative artwork (even Dadaism), fairy-tales, folk literature, the music of Mozart, Beethoven, and Tchaikovsky, pantheistic Christianity (and pantheism in general), and intellectual movements like postmodernism are all direct legacies of Romanticism. What happened after the Enlightenment? Far from achieving supremacy, a massive intellectual, cultural, and literary movement arose in opposition to it.At its heart, the Romantic movement was a movement that was searching for something sacred in an increasingly disenchanted, industrial, and mechanical world being created from the Enlightenment. These Romantics looked for the sacred in many forms: art, (traditional) religion, neo-religion (like Christian Pantheism or Spiritualism), music, literature, nature, anything!Today, the politics of ethnic identity (following a radical understanding of Johann von Herder’s volksgeist), Marxism, anti-globalization and anti-capitalism, and free-love, the intellectual movements of postmodernism, moral relativism and nihilism, and the rise of literary criticism in the social sciences and humanities, are all part of the continued Romantic rebellion against the Enlightenment. Tim Blanning has produced, in under 200 pages, one of the best introductions of Romanticism possible. However, for those who have a great knowledge of Romanticism (perhaps because of being a philosophy major or a lay student of the movement), you will not find anything new. That said, this is the best introduction and popular account of Romanticism that I’ve come across!

I always knew there was a period in art history called Romanticism but didn’t clearly understand how it was characterized or when it happened. This is a short but authoritative cheat sheet that will bring anyone up to speed on the period.

This book was assigned to me for a class reading and has been a great influence on my thinking not of only the greatest artists of the Romantic school of thought, but of the philosophy and the development of such a nebulous and eternal 'era' of thought. I refer back to this book and the well-placed examples of leaders in thought it gave many times after finishing reading it.

The book itself was great, well packaged and arrived in good shape. However, it took 23 days from the day it was ordered, for it to be shipped. In fairness, when I ordered the book I was informed that it would take a month to receive it. At that time I assumed that the book was being shipped from overseas or something like that. I have ordered books that came from England, and they took a while to be delivered. That was not the case here. The order sat unfulfilled for 23 days. In today's market place that seems too long for me.

The hardback has an insert of color plates of good quality, following page 140. In the paperbacks that I've seen, these are in fuzzy, muddy black and white. No color, not much clarity. Throughout the hardback editon, the black and white images are of much better quality than in the paperbacks.

I read this in conjunction with the Isaiah Berlin book, The Roots of Romanticism, and found that both books complement each other and serve as a good introduction to the ideas of the movement. Both are well worth a read.