Romanticism: Impact on Social Thought

Abstract

Romanticism is a broad modern and enlightened movement that aimed at bringing art together again with the philosophy of history, morality, and religion and, thus, attempted to aesthetisize life. The important impact of German romanticism on the emerging social sciences is demonstrated across the following areas: knowledge and hermeneutics, culture and society, critique of modernity, and reason and aesthetics. Recent theoretical approaches in political philosophy (Richard Rorty) as well as literary criticism and the philosophy of language (Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida), which refer to the romantic concept of irony, are thematized. Thus, it is shown that romanticism should not merely be seen as having a continuous impact on social thought, but rather as a mode in which modernity persistently recasts and rewrites its own self-understanding.