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Romantic Nationalism: The Philosophy of the People, the Nation, and the Volksgeist

Romantic nationalism was one of the most influential and most problematic legacies of the Romantic movement. The Romantics argued that every nation has a unique spirit — what the Germans called Volksgeist — expressed in its language, its poetry, its customs, and its history. This idea helped inspire the great liberation movements of the nineteenth century, from the Greek war of independence to the unification of Germany and Italy, and it shaped the modern conception of the nation-state. It also, in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, became entangled with the ethnic and racial nationalism that would contribute to two world wars and to some of the worst atrocities of the modern age.

This page offers a structured introduction to romantic nationalism — its origins, its leading thinkers, its political consequences, and its continuing significance.

The Origins of Romantic Nationalism

The Romantic theory of the nation grew out of the broader Romantic reaction against the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment had emphasized universal reason, universal rights, and the cosmopolitan ideal of a humanity united by common principles. The Romantics, by contrast, insisted on the particularity of human cultures, the rootedness of human beings in specific languages and traditions, and the importance of historical continuity in the formation of national character.

The founder of the new theory was Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), the German philosopher, critic, and translator who is often described as the father of cultural nationalism. In works like Fragments on Recent German Literature (1766–67), Critical Forests (1769), and especially Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784–91), Herder argued that every people has its own unique spirit, expressed most clearly in its language and its poetry, and that this spirit must be respected and cultivated on its own terms.

The Key Concepts

Several concepts were central to the new theory:

Volksgeist — the “spirit of the people” that expressed itself in the language, customs, and historical life of a nation. This idea, developed by Herder, was taken up by the German historical school of jurisprudence (Savigny), by the Grimm brothers in their work on language and folklore, by the German historians (Ranke, Treitschke), and by many other thinkers across Europe.
The folk and the popular — the idea that the deepest truths of a national culture were to be found not in the courtly or upper-class traditions but in the songs, tales, and customs of the common people. The folk-song collections of Herder, the Grimm brothers, Bishop Percy, and others were major contributions to this new vision.
The organic nation — the nation as a living, growing whole, developing through history like an individual human being, with its own particular genius, its own particular destiny, and its own particular contribution to the common civilization of humanity.
Language as the foundation of national identity — the idea that language is not just a tool for communication but the fundamental expression of a people’s way of seeing the world. Herder, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and the Grimm brothers all made language the foundation of national culture.

The Major Figures

The major figures of romantic nationalism include:

Johann Gottfried Herder — the father of cultural nationalism, whose ideas shaped the entire tradition.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte — the German philosopher whose Addresses to the German Nation (1807–08), delivered in Berlin under French occupation, were a major contribution to the new vision.
The Grimm brothers — Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, the great philologists and folklorists, whose fairy tales, dictionary, and Deutsche Grammatik made the German linguistic and folk tradition the foundation of the new national identity.
Friedrich Ludwig Jahn — the “father of gymnastics,” a writer and political activist who promoted physical training and national consciousness among German youth.
Adam Mickiewicz — the great Polish Romantic poet, author of Pan Tadeusz and a major political figure in the Polish independence movement.
Giuseppe Mazzini — the Italian nationalist, whose writings and political work helped make the unification of Italy a reality.
Ján Kollár, Ľudovít Štúr — the Slovak and Czech leaders of the Slavic national movements within the Habsburg Empire.
Aleksandr Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Taras Shevchenko — the great Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish poets who gave the new national consciousness of Eastern Europe its literary voice.
Thomas Davis, John Mitchel, and the Young Ireland movement — Irish nationalist thinkers and writers who drew on the Romantic nationalist tradition.

The Political Achievements

The Romantic nationalist tradition had a remarkable record of political success in the nineteenth century. The Greek war of independence (1821–29), the Belgian revolution of 1830, the Polish uprisings of 1830 and 1863, the Hungarian revolution of 1848, the Italian unification (1859–71), the German unification (1864–71), the Norwegian independence movement, the Bulgarian independence movement, the Czech national revival, the Irish cultural nationalism of the Young Ireland movement, and the various Slavic national movements within the Habsburg and Ottoman empires — all drew, in different ways, on the Romantic nationalist tradition.

The new nation-states that emerged in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — Germany, Italy, Greece, Belgium, Norway, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, the various successor states of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires — were, in many cases, the political realization of the Romantic nationalist idea.

The Dark Side

The Romantic nationalist tradition, however, had a dark side that became increasingly visible in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The same idea that inspired liberal and democratic national movements also inspired ethnic and racial nationalist movements that ended in some of the worst atrocities of the modern age.

The drift from Herder’s cultural nationalism to an ethnic, racial, or chauvinist nationalism took several routes:

The biologization of the nation — the idea that the nation is not just a cultural but a biological entity, a “race” with shared blood, shared physical features, and a shared genetic inheritance. This idea, developed in the late nineteenth century, became central to the racial nationalisms of the early twentieth century.
The exclusion of minorities — the idea that the nation belongs essentially to one people, and that minorities (Jews, Roma, religious or linguistic minorities) are foreign bodies that must be excluded, assimilated, or expelled. This idea led, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to the great wave of antisemitism, ethnic cleansing, and racial violence that culminated in the Holocaust and the other genocides of the twentieth century.
The worship of the nation — the idea that the nation is the highest value, and that individual rights, universal principles, and human values must be subordinated to its glory. This idea, the foundation of fascist and extreme nationalist ideology, has been a destructive force in modern politics.

The Romantic nationalist tradition is, in short, a complex and difficult legacy. The same ideas that helped inspire the great liberal and democratic national movements of the nineteenth century were also distorted, in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, into some of the most dangerous ideologies in the modern world. To study romantic nationalism is to come to terms with one of the most powerful and most problematic legacies of the Romantic period.