Romanticisms, Discriminations: On Lovejoy and The Meaning of Romanticism

Abstract

ABSTRACT Arthur O. Lovejoy is one of several major Romantic critics of rather long ago whose work is well worth revisiting. Lovejoy’s instrumental effort in the founding of the AAUP early in his career is regrettably marked by his role in defending the academic freedom of colleagues who took pronouncedly racist stances. But later in his career, as part of a series of essays from the 1920s to the 1950s that were crucial in articulating how the category of Romanticism could or should function (or not), Lovejoy confronted Romantic dimensions of racially inflected twentieth-century ideological formations. His programmatic essay “The Meaning of Romanticism for the Historian of Ideas” proposes the importance of a connected set of ideas characteristic of German Romanticism and operating in roughly continuous fashion in German intellectual culture from the 1790s up to the time of the essay in the early years of WWII—and still a force in the politico-aesthetic formation he calls Hitlerism. Evoking the critique of Lovejoy’s colleague Leo Spitzer, I suggest the shortcomings of Lovejoy’s analytic method of “history of ideas,” which grants ideas too much autonomy and thus mistakes their force “in action,” to argue against the Romantic link to Hitlerism Lovejoy posits.