The Romantic and the Marxist critique of modern civilization

Abstract

The first critics of modern bourgeois society, of the capitalist civilization created by the Industrial Revolution were - more than half a century before Marx - the Romantic poets and writers. Romantic anti-capitalism was born in the second half of the eighteenth century, but it has not ceased to be an essential component of modern culture up to the present. What is usually designated as the Romantic Movement in the arts and literature, mainly situated at the beginning of the nineteenth century, is only one of its multiple and extremely various manifestations. As a weltanschauung, i.e. an all embracing worldview, a style of thought, a basic structure offeeling, it can be found not only in the work of poets and writers of imagination and fantasy such as Novalis, E. T. A. Hoffmann and the surrealists, but also in the novels of true realists like Balzac, Dickens, and Thomas Mann; not only among artists like Delacroix or the Pre-Raphaelite painters, but also among political economists like Sismondi or sociolo