Romanticism (also known as the Romantic movement or Romantic era) was an artistic, literary, musical, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century, and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate period from 1800 to 1850.
Romanticism was characterized by its emphasis on;
- emotion and individualism,
- idealization of nature,
- suspicion of science and industrialization, and
-
glorification of the past with a strong preference
for the medieval rather than the classical.
It was partly a reaction to;
- the Industrial Revolution,
- the social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment, and
- the scientific rationalization of nature
It was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature, but had a major impact on historiography, education, chess, social sciences, and the natural sciences. It had a significant and complex effect on politics, with romantic thinkers influencing conservatism, liberalism, radicalism, and nationalism.
The movement emphasized intense emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as fear, horror and terror, and awe — especially that experienced in confronting the new aesthetic categories of the sublime and beauty of nature. It elevated folk art and ancient custom to something noble, but also spontaneity as a desirable characteristic (as in the musical impromptu). In contrast to the Rationalism and Classicism of the Enlightenment, Romanticism revived medievalism and elements of art and narrative perceived as authentically medieval in an attempt to escape population growth, early urban sprawl, and industrialism.
Although the movement was rooted in the German Sturm und Drang movement, which preferred intuition and emotion to the rationalism of the Enlightenment, the events and ideologies of the French Revolution were also proximate factors since many of the early Romantics were cultural revolutionaries and sympathetic to the revolution. Romanticism assigned a high value to the achievements of "heroic" individualists and artists, whose examples, it maintained, would raise the quality of society. It also promoted the individual imagination as a critical authority allowed of freedom from classical notions of form in art. There was a strong recourse to historical and natural inevitability, a Zeitgeist, in the representation of its ideas. In the second half of the 19th century, Realism was offered as a polar opposite to Romanticism. The decline of Romanticism during this time was associated with multiple processes, including social and political changes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism
Medievalism is a system of belief and practice inspired by the Middle Ages of Europe, or by devotion to elements of that period, which have been expressed in areas such as architecture, literature, music, art, philosophy, scholarship, and various vehicles of popular culture. Since the 17th century, a variety of movements have used the medieval period as a model or inspiration for creative activity, including Romanticism, the Gothic revival, the pre-Raphaelite and arts and crafts movements, and neo-medievalism (a term often used interchangeably with medievalism).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medievalism
Neo-medievalism (or neomedievalism, new medievalism) is a term with a long history that has acquired specific technical senses in two branches of scholarship. In political theory about modern international relations, where the term is originally associated with Hedley Bull, it sees the political order of a globalized world as analogous to high-medieval Europe, where neither states nor the Church, nor other territorial powers, exercised full sovereignty, but instead participated in complex, overlapping and incomplete sovereignties. In literary theory regarding the use and abuse of texts and tropes from the Middle Ages in postmodernity, the term neomedieval was popularized by the Italian medievalist Umberto Eco in his 1986 essay "Dreaming of the Middle Ages".
Political theory
The idea of neomedievalism in political theory was first discussed in 1977 by theorist Hedley Bull in The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics to describe the erosion of state sovereignty in the contemporary globalized world:
- It is also conceivable that sovereign states might disappear and be replaced not by a world government but by a modern and secular equivalent of the kind of universal political organisation that existed in Western Christendom in the Middle Ages.
- In that system no ruler or state was sovereign in the sense of being supreme over a given territory and a given segment of the Christian population; each had to share authority with vassals beneath, and with the Pope and (in Germany and Italy) the Holy Roman Emperor above.
- The universal political order of Western Christendom represents an alternative to the system of states which does not yet embody universal government.
Thus Bull suggested society might move towards "a new mediaevalism" or a "neo-mediaeval form of universal political order", in which individual notions of rights and a growing sense of a "world common good" were undermining national sovereignty. He proposed that such a system might help "avoid the classic dangers of the system of sovereign states by a structure of overlapping structures and cross-cutting loyalties that hold all peoples together in a universal society while at the same time avoiding the concentration inherent in a world government", though "if it were anything like the precedent of Western Christendom, it would contain more ubiquitous and continuous violence and insecurity than does the modern states system".
In this reading, globalization has resulted in an international system which resembles the medieval one, where political authority was exercised by a range of non-territorial and overlapping agents, such as religious bodies, principalities, empires and city-states, instead of by a single political authority in the form of a state which has complete sovereignty over its territory. Comparable processes characterising Bull's "new medievalism" include the increasing powers held by regional organisations such as the European Union, as well as the spread of sub-national and devolved governments, such as those of Scotland and Catalonia. These challenge the exclusive authority of the state. Private military companies, multinational corporations and the resurgence of worldwide religious movements (e.g. political Islam) similarly indicate a reduction in the role of the state and a decentralisation of power and authority.
Stephen J. Kobrin in 1998 added the forces of the digital world economy to the picture of neomedievalism. In an article entitled "Back to the Future: Neomedievalism and the Postmodern Digital World Economy" in the Journal of International Affairs, he argued that the sovereign state as we know it – defined within certain territorial borders – is about to change profoundly, if not to wither away, due in part to the digital world economy created by the Internet, suggesting that cyberspace is a trans-territorial domain operating outside of the jurisdiction of national law.
Anthony Clark Arend also argued in his 1999 book Legal Rules and International Society that the international system is moving toward a "neo-medieval" system. He claimed that the trends that Bull noted in 1977 had become even more pronounced by the end of the twentieth century. Arend argues that the emergence of a "neo-medieval" system would have profound implications for the creation and operation of international law.
Although Bull originally envisioned neomedievalism as a positive trend, it has its critics. Bruce Holsinger in Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror argues that neoconservatives "have exploited neomedievalism's conceptual slipperiness for their own tactical ends." Similarly, Philip G. Cerny's "Neomedievalism, Civil War and the New Security Dilemma" (1998) also sees neomedievalism as a negative development and claims that the forces of globalization increasingly undermine nation-states and interstate forms of governance "by cross-cutting linkages among different economic sectors and social bonds," calling globalization a "durable disorder" which eventually leads to the emergence of the new security dilemmas that had analogies in the Middle Ages. Cerny identifies six characteristics of a neomedieval world that contribute to this disorder: multiple competing institutions; lack of exogenous territorializing pressures both on sub-national and international levels; uneven consolidation of new spaces, cleavages, conflicts and inequalities; fragmented loyalties and identities; extensive entrenchment of property rights; and spread of the "grey zones" outside the law as well as black economy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-medievalism
Romantic Nationalism (also national romanticism, organic nationalism, identity nationalism) is the form of nationalism in which the state derives its political legitimacy as an organic consequence of the unity of those it governs. This includes such factors as language, race, ethnicity, culture, religion, and customs of the nation in its primal sense of those who were born within its culture. It can be applied to ethnic nationalism as well as civic nationalism. Romantic nationalism arose in reaction to dynastic or imperial hegemony, which assessed the legitimacy of the state from the top down, emanating from a monarch or other authority, which justified its existence. Such downward-radiating power might ultimately derive from a god or gods (see the divine right of kings and the Mandate of Heaven).
Among the key themes of Romanticism, and its most enduring legacy, the cultural assertions of romantic nationalism have also been central in post-Enlightenment art and political philosophy. From its earliest stirrings, with their focus on the development of national languages and folklore, and the spiritual value of local customs and traditions, to the movements that would redraw the map of Europe and lead to calls for self-determination of nationalities, nationalism was one of the key issues in Romanticism, determining its roles, expressions and meanings. Romantic nationalism, resulting from this interaction between cultural production and political thought, became "the celebration of the nation (defined in its language, history and cultural character) as an inspiring ideal for artistic expression; and the instrumentalization of that expression in political consciousness-raising".
Historically in Europe, the watershed year for romantic nationalism was 1848, when a revolutionary wave spread across the continent; numerous nationalistic revolutions occurred in various fragmented regions (such as Italy) or multinational states (such as the Austrian Empire). While initially the revolutions fell to reactionary forces and the old order was quickly re-established, the many revolutions would mark the first step towards liberalisation and the formation of modern nation states across much of Europe.
Brief history
The ideas of Rousseau (1712–1778) and of Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803) inspired much early Romantic nationalism in Europe. Herder argued nationality was the product of climate, geography 'but more particularly, languages, inclinations and characters,' rather than genetics.
From its beginnings in the late 18th century, romantic nationalism has relied upon the existence of a historical ethnic culture which meets the romantic ideal; folklore developed as a romantic nationalist concept. The Brothers Grimm, inspired by Herder's writings, put together an idealized collection of tales, which they labeled as authentically German. The concept of an inherited cultural patrimony from a common origin rapidly became central to a divisive question within romantic nationalism: specifically, is a nation unified because it comes from the same genetic source, that is because of race, or is the participation in the organic nature of the "folk" culture self-fulfilling?
Romantic nationalism formed a key strand in the philosophy of Hegel (1770–1831), who argued that there was a "spirit of the age" or zeitgeist that inhabited a particular people at a particular time. When this group of people became the active determiner of history, it was simply because their cultural and political moment had come. Because of the Germans' role in the Protestant Reformation, Hegel (a Lutheran) argued that his historical moment had seen the Zeitgeist settle on the German-speaking peoples.
In continental Europe, Romantics had embraced the French Revolution in its beginnings, then found themselves fighting the counter-Revolution in the trans-national Imperial system of Napoleon. The sense of self-determination and national consciousness that had enabled revolutionary forces to defeat aristocratic regimes in battle became rallying points for resistance against the French Empire (1804–14). In Prussia, the development of spiritual renewal as a means to engage in the struggle against Napoleon was argued by, among others, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), a disciple of Kant. The word Volkstum, or "folkhood", was coined in Germany as part of this resistance to French hegemony.
Fichte expressed the unity of language and nation in his thirteenth address "To the German Nation" in 1806:
The first, original, and truly natural boundaries of states are beyond doubt their internal boundaries. Those who speak the same language are joined to each other by a multitude of invisible bonds by nature herself, long before any human art begins; they understand each other and have the power of continuing to make themselves understood more and more clearly; they belong together and are by nature one and an inseparable whole. (Kelly, 1968, pp. 190–91)Only when each people, left to itself, develops and forms itself in accordance with its own peculiar quality, and only when in every people each individual develops himself in accordance with that common quality, as well as in accordance with his own peculiar quality-then, and then only, does the manifestation of divinity appear in its true mirror as it ought to be; and only a man who either entirely lacks the notion of the rule of law and divine order, or else is an obdurate enemy thereto, could take upon himself to want to interfere with that law, which is the highest law in the spiritual world! (Kelly, 1968, pp. 197–98)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romantic_nationalism
European Romantic Perception of the MIddle Ages
Abstract - The aims of this study are theoretical and comparative. It contains a theoretical section describing the 18th and 19th centuries visions of the Middle Ages (admirable, critical and indifferent). Then, the relationships with the European romantics, including the Catalans, are studied. The folkloric and nationalism are presented as bridges between the two epochs. The history of the 17th and 18th centuries Picturesque is reviewed and a new view of it is presented. Instead of conceiving it as a minor aesthetic, I propose it as a precedent for the avant-garde given its defence of the irregular and the badly done. Furthermore, the 19th century idea of paradise lost was conceptualised around four axes (past, infancy, nature and art) and I propose a fifth (ethnicity) for the 21st century.
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/45665490.pdf
National Romanticism - The end of the eighteenth century and first decades of the nineteenth were in many respects a watershed period in European history. The dramatic convulsions of the French Revolution revealed, and opened, viable as well as unviable roads for the future development of European society. In connection with the ideas of the Enlightenment it shattered the old bonds and cast doubt upon the established moral and social norms that continued to stem from the basis of the old corporate society. The Napoleonic wars integrated Russia once and for all into the political and, indirectly, cultural history of Europe. The steam engine and other technical achievements signalled the advent of the industrial revolution. In arts and culture, a new trend, Romanticism, was successfully asserting itself against Classicism. At the same time, though with less success, it had pretences also of becoming a new ‘way of life.’ The civil service was rationalized and bureaucratized. And, above all, a new group identity was announced, which, partly on the basis of the existing structure of the European states, partly in opposition to it, elevated the nation as the supreme value and fundamental ‘centrum securitatis.’
Was it only coincidental timing or was there a causal relation, direct or indirect, that linked together all these changes? Our chief interest here will be the relation between Romanticism and national identity, even though, as we shall see, these two notions or, if you like, evolutionary trends cannot be understood without the context of the other great changes of the period. A consideration of the relationship between Romanticism and national consciousness suggests from the beginning two questions that we need to consider first if we wish to avoid misunderstanding and superficial models:
1. What is national about Romanticism?
2. What is Romantic about the nation?
These clearly are questions that cannot be answered without some preliminary consideration of terminology. One cannot think of Romanticism solely as a literary trend; in the main it is an approach to life, which was projected also into a value system and into conduct as well as into works of art. What was the nature of that approach to life? Usually, by ‘Romantic approach’ one understands a strong emphasis on emotion, the subjectivization of attitudes, an attempt to be unconventional, the absence of a realistic approach to the world, and so forth. There is, however, no generally accepted definition of Romanticism, and when we do come across a consensus about it among experts, it tends to be in the negative definition: Romanticism is labeled a reaction to Enlightenment rationalism and cool, restrained Classicism. Although even that is not an entirely unambiguous characterization (we find the emphasis on emotion even in the Sentimentalism of the eighteenth century), it is evident that it tends to apply more to art than to approaches to life. And it is the latter that are of particular interest to us for our topic, the relationship between national identity and Romanticism.
I believe that what constitutes the common denominator of so-called Romantic approaches to life can be called a sense of social alienation, a feeling of loneliness, which stems from a sense of insecurity, from the disrupted harmony of the world. This feeling was not widespread: it was shared chiefly by men and women of letters, philosophers, and the educated on the whole. They sought a different way out of the situation and it cannot therefore be characterized without a certain, though probably simplistic, typology. We can distinguish at least five roads to a new sense of security, to a sense of belonging. These roads, which were meant to become ways out of the crisis, were not mutually exclusive; they may, depending on the case, also be complementary, and we do not therefore encounter them in pure forms. Nevertheless, we can usually say that in the approaches and views of this or that author, or this or that great figure, some of these ideas dominated and others occupied a secondary position, and though they do not appear in a pure form, some tended usually to predominate.
The fundamental road that was meant to lead the Romantics to a new sense of security was the road of individualization and subjectivization: one could find this sense of security in a deep, intense personal relationship — in love, often unrequited, for someone of the opposite sex, who was usually idealized, and in friendship with someone of the same sex. The search for personal security by turning to love merely seemed to be a safe, unproblematic road: on the contrary, it often became the source of new insecurities. That search for new individualized values and relationships concerned the inner self and therefore ran opposite to the search for the great new community, the ‘nation.’
No less complicated, but socially more relevant, was the search for a stability of relationships by turning to the past: from the gloomy reality of the present the Romantic turned to an idealized picture of ages past, of which the Middle Ages enjoyed the greatest popularity, whether as a counterweight to the Antiquity so beloved of Classicism, or as a model of high-principled valor, the certain virtue of knights so different from the complicated people of the present. The historicism of the Romantics, however, also had another aspect: the individual sought continuity, a connection with previous generations, at the levels of both the individual and the community that he or she identified with.
This historicizing component of the search for security could strengthen the group identity, which either already existed or had been rediscovered, by searching for a common fate, shared heroism, or the suffering of the national community in the distant or recent past. It was in this historical context that the relationship to the community, ‘the nation,’ moved, as we shall see, to the fore. It would, however, be an over-simplification if we reduced this turn to history to a Romantic approach. What is called the ‘historicism of the nineteenth century’ had deeper, more complex roots.
Another search for new stability led the Romantics to the common people, and was not infrequently connected precisely with those elements of historicism or, more precisely, with that component of the turn to the past, which was fashioning the myth of the ‘Golden Age,’ a time when people were still sincere, selfless, and unspoiled by civilization. More often, however, it was a search for the ideal of the common people in the present day—among the simple country-folk (and therefore in folk art too) on the one hand, and among the natives of distant lands on the other; it was in this context that the popular construct of the ‘noble savage’ was born. This context also includes, however, the idealization of the common man, usually a peasant or countryman, as the vehicle of elementary, universally human, national values.
The feeling of being uprooted sometimes led also to a rejection of society and to a revolt against it. In the mental world of all revolution and revolutionaries in the first half of the nineteenth century, views and approaches appear which are usually called expressions of Romanticism and Romantic utopianism: faith in man and his sound moral core, criticism of the world that was based on selfishness and the exploitation or oppression of others, and hence a desire for a new, better world. Many a time, the radical, that is to say, violent, methods and means used by revolutionaries to achieve their ends are called ‘Romantic.’
For our context the most important search for a way out of the crisis of values and identity was the search for a new community in which the individual who was freed from the bonds of corporate society and stripped of a sense of security could put down roots, a community with which he or she could identify. The search for a new collective spirit need not necessarily have the character of a revolutionary dream of a new society: it can lead to a community of a new kind — namely, the nation. The term ‘nation’ was itself already part of the vocabulary of the educated at the time (as a designation of inhabitants of a state and as a designation of an ethnic community), but it now acquired a value connotation and emotional charge, which was allied to both the Romantics and, to some extent, their works.
https://books.openedition.org/ceup/2245?lang=en
Medievalism, Nationalism, and European Studies: New Approaches in Digital
Pedagogy
https://www.europenowjournal.org/2020/06/02/medievalism-nationalism-and-european-studies-new-approaches-in-digital-pedagogy/
The Great Complicity: Medievalism and Nationalism
https://www.medievalists.net/2022/01/medievalism-and-nationalism/
Notes toward a Definition of Romantic Nationalism
https://www.academia.edu/47277513/Notes_toward_a_Definition_of_Romantic_Nationalism
The role of Romanticism in facilitating, supporting and encouraging the growth of contemporary far-right extremism is often missed, although intellectual giants such as Isaiah Berlin and Carl Schmitt spoke of political romanticism in their studies of nationalism.
A close reading of many of the manifestos of right-wing terrorists such as Anders Behring Breivik, Brenton Tarrant, Dylan Roof and Robert Bowers emphasize a desire to return to an imagined past based on their romantic readings of battles and communities, which is why Romanticism serves as a useful tool in understanding not only the rise of contemporary far-right extremism, but what drives the movement.
Romanticism and Far-Right Extremism - European Eye on Radicalization
https://eeradicalization.com/romanticism-and-far-right-extremism/
After decades of dormancy, the nationalist far right is once more on the march in Germany. Having vowed to “take our country back”—from Brussels, from liberals, from immigrants—the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) holds ninety-two seats in the Bundestag federal parliament and is represented in fourteen Landtag regional parliaments. No far-right party had ever before gained parliamentary representation in post-war Germany. As of the 2017 federal elections, the AfD was the Bundestag’s third-largest faction. The rise of today’s far-right nationalists is so troubling because of the devastation wrought by nationalism in the previous century. The outrages of fascism, its specters of secret police, show trials, death camps, and wars of conquest, all done in the nation’s name, have forged a powerful link between nationalism and authoritarianism. The two, however, are not inseparable.
To defend against nationalism’s authoritarian tendencies, liberal democracies have deployed “civic nationalism” to defend republican institutions and individual rights, as seen in Great Britain and the United States during both World Wars. From John Stuart Mill through Yael Tamir, scholars have located in nationalism an answer to the “mobilization problem” in democratic society. Both nationalism’s diversity of political possibilities and its discursive features that determine such possibilities can be gleaned from one of the most vibrant periods in German intellectual history: early Romanticism.
When the early Romantics, chief among them Novalis, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and the brothers Schlegel, congregated in the university town of Jena between 1798 and 1804, a vigorous debate arose around how to define the nation, how to interpret this definition and how to apply it to political practice. Underlying this interplay of ideas, the period demonstrates how the epistemological basis of nationalistic concepts shape nationalist political practices. The early Romantics show that the scope of political practices does not depend on the content of nationalistic concepts themselves, but is vested in the meanings that make these concepts comprehensible in a historical discourse. Significantly, the meanings attributed to nationalist concepts during early Romanticism were not primarily political, historical, or ethical, but epistemological.
As understood by early Romantics, the epistemologies that undergird authoritarian political practices are dogmatic. Epistemologies that champion freedom are critical, precluding authoritarianism by arguing for the plurality and plasticity of claims to knowledge. The former upholds an epistemology that is essential, exhaustive, and incontrovertible. The latter, one which is syncretic, challengeable, and revisable. These commonalities between dogmatism and authoritarianism, and between criticism and freedom, are not coincidental. Critical positions developed by the early Romantics show that resistance to dogmatic epistemology reinforces resistance to authoritarianism.
In their quest for a new paradigm of truth and value, the Romantics fused the arts and sciences. They viewed modern life as morbidly fractured. Reductive classification in the sciences and rigid emulation of classical ideals in the arts had denuded humanity of its creativity and authenticity. The effects on society were equally deleterious, rendering human existence “philistine” and “barbarous.” The Romantics diagnosed society’s growing malaise as Trennung, or separation—further expressed as alienation, estrangement and division.
https://www.athwart.org/early-romantic-nationalism/
left off page 2 one link saved ^^^ from above
https://www.google.com/search?q=romanticism+medievalism+nationalism&client=tablet-android-tmus-us-revc&source=android-browser&ei=A1nEYuHiKMTVkPIPjfWU2AY&start=20&sa=N&ved=2ahUKEwih8IC6iOL4AhXEKkQIHY06BWsQ8tMDegQIARA5&biw=1205&bih=729&dpr=2.13
The Great Complicity: Medievalism and Nationalism - Medievalists.net
https://www.medievalists.net/2022/01/medievalism-and-nationalism/
