Romanticism vs. the Enlightenment: A Clash of Worldviews

“All nature is but art, unknown to thee; All chance, direction, which thou canst not see; All discord, harmony not understood; All partial evil, universal good.” — Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, 1734

Few contrasts in modern intellectual history are sharper than that between Romanticism and the Enlightenment. For the eighteenth-century philosophes, the highest achievements of humanity lay in the triumph of reason over superstition, in universal moral and political principles, in the steady progress of science, art, and government. For the early nineteenth-century Romantics, this rationalist program had grown cold and thin; the deepest truths of human life were to be found not in abstract argument but in feeling, imagination, tradition, and the inner life. To understand the contrast between these two great worldviews is to understand the intellectual history of the modern West.

This page compares the two traditions in detail — their central ideas about reason, nature, the individual, society, art, and politics — and shows how their conflict shaped the major cultural movements of the last three centuries.

The Enlightenment Program

The European Enlightenment — also called the Age of Reason — was the great intellectual movement of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its founding figures included John Locke, Isaac Newton, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Diderot, David Hume, Adam Smith, and Immanuel Kant. Its central project was to apply the methods of natural science to the realms of human life — government, religion, morality, education, art — and to construct a new world on rational principles.

The Enlightenment commitment to reason took several forms:

• Scientific reason — the steady expansion of the methods of empirical inquiry, mathematical proof, and experimental verification.
• Political reason — the analysis of government in terms of natural rights, social contracts, and the public good; the work of Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and the framers of the American Constitution.
• Moral reason — the attempt to ground ethics in rational principles of universal human equality and dignity; the cosmopolitan ideal of “the rights of man.”
• Aesthetic reason — the analysis of art in terms of universal rules, imitation of classical models, and the appeal to a shared standard of taste; the central project of Neoclassicism.

For the Enlightenment, the highest ideal of human life was the rational, autonomous individual, capable of self-government, civic virtue, and the disinterested pursuit of truth.

The Romantic Reaction

The Romantics did not entirely reject this Enlightenment inheritance. They were, in many cases, the children of the Enlightenment, and they continued to value many of its achievements. But they argued that the Enlightenment had missed something essential — the dark, irrational, imaginative, and emotional dimensions of human life that no rational analysis could exhaust.

The Romantic critique of the Enlightenment included several charges:

• The impoverishment of feeling — that the Enlightenment, in its devotion to reason, had starved the heart. As Rousseau put it in the famous opening of his Discourse on the Sciences and Arts (1750), the arts and sciences had not improved human beings morally; they had, if anything, corrupted them.
• The suppression of imagination — that the Enlightenment, in its devotion to rules and clear ideas, had dried up the sources of creative art. The Romantic vision of the artistic genius — original, spontaneous, mysterious — was developed in direct opposition to the Neoclassical ideal of the rule-following craftsman.
• The denial of history and tradition — that the Enlightenment, in its devotion to universal reason, had ignored the depth and particularity of human cultures, languages, and traditions. Herder, Burke, and the early Romantics insisted that human beings were rooted in particular languages, religions, and customs, and that these could not be replaced by abstract principles.
• The deadening effect of mechanism — that the Enlightenment, in its devotion to the new science, had reduced the natural world to a dead mechanism, in which the rich qualitative experience of the world — its beauty, its sublimity, its spiritual significance — was lost. The Romantic response was the recovery of nature as a living presence, a teacher, and a symbol.
• The tyranny of uniformity — that the Enlightenment, in its devotion to universal moral and political principles, was, ironically, the parent of a new kind of despotism — the despotism of abstract reason, of bureaucratic uniformity, of the “rational” state. This Romantic critique of “Enlightenment despotism” was developed by Herder, the early German Romantics, and many later critics.

The Two Traditions in Contrast

The contrast between the two traditions can be summarized in a series of characteristic oppositions.

These oppositions are, of course, simplifications. Real thinkers, on both sides, were more complicated than the contrasts suggest. Immanuel Kant, for example, was both an Enlightenment rationalist and the great theorist of aesthetic judgment and the sublime. Edmund Burke was both a defender of Enlightenment political principles and the theorist of the sublime that would become a central concept of Romanticism. Yet the broad contrast remains a powerful and illuminating one.

The Continuing Tension

The tension between Enlightenment and Romanticism did not end in the early nineteenth century. It has shaped almost every major intellectual debate of the modern period:

• The rise of romantic nationalism and the political movements of the nineteenth century.
• The Victorian reconciliation of Romantic and Enlightenment ideals.
• The twentieth-century revolt against the Enlightenment, including the German Kulturkritik of Nietzsche, Spengler, and Heidegger; the French critique of Enlightenment “rationality” in the work of Foucault and Derrida; and the broader “counter-Enlightenment” tradition.
• The contemporary debates about political liberalism, identity, and the place of tradition in modern life.

To understand the Romantic-Enlightenment contrast is to understand a great deal about the intellectual history of the modern West, and about the cultural and political debates of our own time.

Further Reading

• Isaiah Berlin, “The Counter-Enlightenment,” in Against the Current (Oxford, 1979) — Berlin’s case for the Romantics as a permanent alternative to the Enlightenment rather than a simple rejection of it.
• Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton, 1951) — the great German account of the Enlightenment, with a long closing chapter on the Romantics as the first serious counter-current.
• John Gray, Enlightenment’s Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age (Routledge, 2007) — a short, polemical, often brilliant case that the modern world is the inheritor of both the Enlightenment and Romanticism, and that the present tension between them is the central political fact of our time.
• The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Kant, who is the hinge between the two traditions.

Related Pages

• Characteristics of Romanticism
• Origins of Romanticism
• The Romantic Hero
• Genius and Imagination
• The Sublime
• Romantic Nationalism
• Romanticism by Country
• The Legacy of Romanticism