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    The Roots of Romanticism: Second Edition
    The Roots of Romanticism: Second Edition
    The Roots of Romanticism: Second Edition
    Ebook296 pages5 hours

    The Roots of Romanticism: Second Edition

    By Isaiah Berlin, Henry Hardy and John Gray

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    A brilliant brief account of romanticism and its influence from one of the most important philosophers and intellectual historians of the twentieth century

    In The Roots of Romanticism, one of the twentieth century's most influential philosophers dissects and assesses a movement that changed the course of history. Brilliant, fresh, immediate, and eloquent, these celebrated Mellon Lectures are a bravura intellectual performance. Isaiah Berlin surveys the many attempts to define romanticism, distills its essence, traces its developments from its first stirrings to its apotheosis, and shows how it still permeates our outlook. He ranges over a cast of some of the greatest thinkers and artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including Kant, Rousseau, Diderot, Schiller, the Schlegels, Novalis, Goethe, Blake, Byron, and Beethoven. The ideas and attitudes of these and other figures, Berlin argues, helped to shape twentieth-century nationalism, existentialism, democracy, totalitarianism, and our ideas about heroic individuals, self-fulfillment, and the exalted place of art.

    This new edition, illustrated for the first time, also features a new foreword by philosopher John Gray, in which he discusses Berlin's belief that the influence of romanticism has been unpredictable and contradictory in the extreme, fuelling anti-liberal political movements but also reinvigorating liberalism; a revised text; and a new appendix that includes some of Berlin's correspondence about the lectures and the reactions to them.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateJun 2, 2013
    ISBN9781400846696
    The Roots of Romanticism: Second Edition

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      The Roots of Romanticism - Isaiah Berlin

      Cover: The Roots of Romanticism by Isaiah Berlin

      THE ROOTS OF ROMANTICISM

      ISAIAH BERLIN WAS BORN IN RIGA, now capital of Latvia, in 1909. When he was six, his family moved to Russia; there in 1917, in Petrograd, he witnessed both Revolutions – Social Democratic and Bolshevik. In 1921 his family came to England, and he was educated at St Paul’s School, London, and Corpus Christi College, Oxford.

      At Oxford he was a Fellow of All Souls, a Fellow of New College, Professor of Social and Political Theory, and founding President of Wolfson College. He also held the Presidency of the British Academy. In addition to The Roots of Romanticism, his main published works are Karl Marx, The Age of Enlightenment, Russian Thinkers, Concepts and Categories, Against the Current, Personal Impressions, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, The Sense of Reality, The Proper Study of Mankind, The Power of Ideas, Three Critics of the Enlightenment, Freedom and Its Betrayal, Liberty, The Soviet Mind and Political Ideas in the Romantic Age. As an exponent of the history of ideas he was awarded the Erasmus, Lippincott and Agnelli Prizes; he also received the Jerusalem Prize for his lifelong defence of civil liberties. He died in 1997.

      Henry Hardy, a Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, is one of Isaiah Berlin’s Literary Trustees. He has edited (or co-edited) many other books by Berlin, including all those listed above, and a four-volume edition of his letters. He is co-editor of The One and the Many: Reading Isaiah Berlin (2007), editor of The Book of Isaiah: Personal Impressions of Isaiah Berlin (2009), and author of In Search of Isaiah Berlin: A Literary Adventure (2018).

      John Gray is Emeritus Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics, and author of Isaiah Berlin: An Interpretation of His Thought.

      For further information about Isaiah Berlin visit

      <https://isaiah-berlin.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/>

      <https://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/>

      ALSO BY ISAIAH BERLIN

      *

      Karl Marx

      The Hedgehog and the Fox

      The Age of Enlightenment

      Russian Thinkers

      Concepts and Categories

      Against the Current

      The Crooked Timber of Humanity

      Personal Impressions

      The Sense of Reality

      The Proper Study of Mankind

      The Power of Ideas

      Three Critics of the Enlightenment

      Freedom and Its Betrayal

      Liberty

      The Soviet Mind

      Political Ideas in the Romantic Age

      with Beata Polanowska-Sygulska

      Unfinished Dialogue

      *

      Flourishing: Letters 1928–1946

      Enlightening: Letters 1946–1960

      Building: Letters 1960–1975

      Affirming: Letters 1975–1997

      Headshot of author Isaiah Berlin.

      Isaiah Berlin in 1968, by Helen Muspratt

      THE ROOTS OF ROMANTICISM

      ISAIAH BERLIN

      Edited by Henry Hardy

      THE A. W. MELLON LECTURES IN THE FINE ARTS

      NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART, WASHINGTON, DC

      BOLLINGEN SERIES XXXV:45

      Second Edition

      Foreword by John Gray

      PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

      PRINCETON AND OXFORD

      Published in the United States of America and Canada by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

      Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, Princeton University Press

      press.princeton.edu

      First edition published in the US by Princeton University Press 1999

      Second edition 2013

      Reprinted with corrections 2023

      © The Trustees of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC,

      The Trustees of the Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust, and Henry Hardy 1999, 2013

      Photo of Isaiah Berlin by Helen Muspratt, Ramsey & Muspratt,

      © The Trustees of the Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust

      Portrait of Frederic Chopin (1810–49), Musician by Eugène Delacroix, Louvre, image © RMN-Grand Palais (Musee du Louvre)/Jean-Gilles Berizzi Hector Berlioz by Émile Signol, image © Académie de France à Rome Napoleon I on the Battlefield at Eylau, 9 February 1807 by Antoine-Jean Gros, Louvre, image © RMN-Grand Palais (Musee du Louvre)/Daniel Arnaudet Apotheosis of the French Heroes Who Died for Their Country During the War of Liberation: Homage to Napoleon Bonaparte by Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson, Malmaison, chateaux de Malmaison et Bois-Preau, image © RMN-Grand Palais/Franck Raux Rue Transnonain, le 15 avril 1834 by Honoré Daumier, image © The Trustees of the British Museum

      Drawing of Isaiah Berlin © The Washington Post 1965

      Telegram from Helen Rapp © the BBC 1965

      The moral right of Isaiah Berlin and Henry Hardy to be identified as the author and editor of this work respectively has been asserted

      This is the forty-fifth volume of the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, which are delivered annually at the National Gallery of Art, Washington. The volumes of lectures constitute Number XXXV in Bollingen Series, sponsored by the Bollingen Foundation.

      All Rights Reserved

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Berlin, Isaiah, 1909–1997.

      The roots of romanticism / Isaiah Berlin ; edited by Henry Hardy ; foreword by John Gray. – 2nd ed.

      p. cm. – (A. W. Mellon lectures in the fine arts) (Bollingen series 45)

      Includes bibliographical references and index.

      ISBN 978-0-691-15620-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Romanticism in art. 2. Arts, Modern–18th century. I.

      Hardy, Henry. II. Title.

      NX452.5.R64B47 2013

      141´.6–dc23

      2012035276

      eISBN 9781400846696

      Version 2.1

      British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

      In memory of Alan Bullock

      CONTENTS

      Foreword by John Gray xi

      Editor’s Preface xix

      1 In Search of a Definition 1

      2 The First Attack on Enlightenment 26

      3 The True Fathers of Romanticism 54

      4 The Restrained Romantics 79

      5 Unbridled Romanticism 107

      6 The Lasting Effects 137

      Appendix to the Second Edition 171

      References 181

      Index 201

      FOREWORD

      Children of Two Worlds

      John Gray

      THE FACT THAT IDEAS RARELY have the consequences their authors intended, and never only those consequences, is a recurring theme in Isaiah Berlin’s work. It is not just that ideas are very often compromised when they are put into practice – a familiar enough theme. Divergences in how the ideas are understood and the tangle of human interests and motives mean that no idea can ever be implemented without adulteration or distortion. As Immanuel Kant put it in a formula that Berlin was fond of quoting, ‘Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.’¹ Whether or not Berlin interpreted Kant correctly, the message is clear: the distance between ideas and their applications is a measure of human imperfection.

      Berlin’s work illuminates a more interesting fact. Once they are out in the world, ideas change their shape and reappear in forms that are fundamentally at odds with the original conceptions. David Hume’s claim that our belief in cause and effect is a product of habit rather than rational inference was advanced as part of his philosophy of sceptical doubt. The Scottish Enlightenment thinker did not anticipate that his claim would be used in the service of religion. Had he done so, he would have been horrified. Yet that is exactly what happened when the Christian fideist J. G. Hamann used Hume’s argument to mount a defence of the reality of miracles. Whereas Hume used scepticism about causation to argue that we can never know that a miracle has occurred, Hamann used that same scepticism to argue that miracles did occur. For Hume the end-point of philosophical enquiry, for Hamann sceptical doubt was the starting point for a leap of faith.

      As Berlin makes clear, Hamann was a key figure in the development of Romanticism: ‘There is one man who, in my view, struck the most violent blow against the Enlightenment and began the whole Romantic process […]. He [Hamann] began with Hume, and said in effect that Hume was right; that if you ask yourself how it is that you know the universe, the answer is that you know it not by intellect, but by faith.’² There is something paradoxical in one of the Enlightenment’s greatest thinkers adding to the intellectual armoury of the Counter-Enlightenment. The paradox is heightened when we remember Berlin’s view that Hamann was reacting against ideas that all Enlightenment thinkers shared.

      It has become fashionable to question whether the quarrelling family of movements that are commonly grouped together as ‘the Enlightenment’ had any shared intellectual commitments, but Berlin will have none of this. Certainly the Enlightenment was nothing like a uniform movement. Even so, ‘what is common to all these thinkers is the view that virtue consists ultimately in knowledge; that if we know what we are, and we know what we need, and we know where to obtain it by the best means in our possession, then we can live happy, virtuous, just, free and contented lives.’³ Whatever their differences – which were many and in some cases profound – Enlightenment thinkers accepted three basic assumptions: all genuine questions can, in principle, be answered; these answers can be known by methods that can be learnt and taught to others; and all the answers must be compatible with one another. These assumptions – ‘the general presuppositions of the rationalist Western tradition, whether Christian or pagan, whether theist or atheist’⁴ – were not confined to Enlightenment thinkers, nor even to the West. They expressed a perennial philosophy, which has been articulated in many epochs and cultures. But the assumptions Berlin lists formed the backbone of the main Western tradition, and ‘it is this’ he writes ‘that Romanticism cracked’.⁵ Romanticism, then, is not simply a reaction against the Enlightenment, but ‘the greatest transformation of Western consciousness, certainly in our time’.⁶

      It is a large claim, and possibly exaggerated. But one need not accept Berlin’s assertion of the pivotal role of Romanticism in modern thought to find his account of the Romantics instructive. As he shows, it was the Romantics who introduced ideas of originality into the arts. The very idea of the artist as a creator, he suggests, is a Romantic inheritance. It was not until the flowering of Romanticism in the early nineteenth century that novelty was seen as being in itself a valuable attribute in a work of art; only then had we come to believe that the task of the artist was to bring something new into the world. Along with ideas of originality, there emerged, among some of the Romantics, a conception of the artist as an almost godlike figure who could reshape the world at will. There was an increasing emphasis on authenticity: the idea that human beings should follow only values that they have themselves created or somehow made their own – as a value in itself, possibly more important than any other. In time, this developed into the idea that cultures are, or ideally should be, simple wholes, pure in themselves and untouched by alien influences. At this point Romanticism began to spill out from the arts, and have an influence on ethics and politics.

      Berlin described this larger impact in his prefatory remarks at the start of the lectures, delivered in 1965 in Washington, DC, of which The Roots of Romanticism is an edited transcript. As the editor, Henry Hardy, records, Berlin in his notes for the lectures made the point that ‘the interest of Romanticism is not simply historical. A great many phenomena of the present day – nationalism, existentialism, admiration for great men, admiration for impersonal institutions, democracy, totalitarianism – are profoundly affected by the rise of Romanticism, which enters them all. For this reason it is a subject not altogether irrelevant even to our own day.’⁷

      What is striking about this passage is how contradictory Berlin believes the influence of Romanticism to have been. In a standard liberal view, the impact of Romanticism on politics was almost entirely negative. For many twentieth-century liberal thinkers – Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper, Jacob Talmon and others – the Romantics were the progenitors of modern political irrationalism, a heady brew from which not only the nationalist Fichte drank, but also the more dangerous thinkers who attached themselves to European Fascism, such as the far-right reactionary Charles Maurras.

      Berlin does not deny that Romanticism has been dangerous in this way. In his fifth lecture, ‘Unbridled Romanticism’, he acknowledges that Romantic thinking contained this potential for danger from the start. The Romantics’ belief in creativity involved a rejection of cause and effect and even of logic. For them reason was a kind of confinement, and freedom a triumph of the will. They scorned peaceful coexistence and reasonable compromise; only the passionate expression of deeply held values, whatever the consequences in practice, was for them truly human and worthy of admiration. From this came the cult of authenticity, which finds virtue in fanaticism as long as it is practised sincerely. Human life was a battleground in which ideals and ways of life were irreconcilably at odds. Any attempt to moderate this conflict was cowardly and deadening, for it was only in the full-hearted commitment to their freely chosen projects that human beings could be self-determining and self-creating. As Berlin summarised this Romantic outlook, ‘the free untrammelled will and the denial of the fact that there is a nature of things, the attempt to blow up and explode the very notion of a stable structure of anything – are the deepest and in a sense the most insane elements in this extremely valuable and important movement’.⁸

      Yet while Romanticism fuelled anti-liberal movements, Berlin suggests that it also nourished and renewed liberalism. The idea that ‘there are many values, and that they are incompatible; the whole notion of plurality, of inexhaustibility, of the imperfection of all human answers and arrangements; the notion that no single answer which claims to be perfect and true, whether in art or life, can in principle be perfect and true’⁹ – this insight of Romanticism, which inspired so many anti-liberal movements, also helped forge a more durable liberal philosophy. The Romantics did more than draw attention to the irrational springs of human behaviour. By insisting on the diversity of human ideals they showed the need – however much they might deny it – for tolerance, for ‘the necessity of preserving an imperfect equilibrium in human affairs […]. The result of Romanticism, then, is liberalism, toleration, decency and the appreciation of the imperfections of life; some degree of increased rational self-understanding.’¹⁰ In a reversal of a kind common in the history of thought, the Romantics gave a new lease on life to ideas and values they despised.

      There will be some who question whether the ‘imperfect equilibrium in human affairs’ that Berlin defends really does follow from the Romantic assertion of the plurality and incompatibility of human values – and if it does, whether this imperfect equilibrium is the same as liberalism. Leading as they often do into profitless discussions of Berlin’s ‘relativism’, these questions will not be pursued here. But something may be worth saying in Berlin’s defence.

      To begin with, it is at least arguable that Berlin has sketched the outlines of a kind of liberalism that does not rely on what he described as ‘the general presuppositions of the rationalist Western tradition’. Thinking within this tradition, many people take for granted that liberalism must consist of a system of clearly articulated universal principles – principles about human rights, for example. Whether this assumption can be squared with the historical variety of thinkers and movements that are commonly recognised as liberal is doubtful. Berlin is invoking a version of liberalism based in practices – chiefly practices of toleration and decency – rather than on principles of right. Liberal thought of this type has not evoked a great deal of interest from philosophers – Avishai Margalit, who defends a similar liberalism in his brilliant book The Decent Society (1996), is one of the few that come to mind – but it is a defensible philosophy, and one with a discernible intellectual pedigree. In any event the position Berlin articulates has the merit of reflecting the attitudes of writers who have deeply explored the conflicts that go with a liberal way of life. Partly for that reason, it may yet prove to be more resilient than current liberal orthodoxies. We may have more to learn from Alexander Herzen and Ivan Turgenev about the strengths and fragility of a liberal way of life than we do from John Stuart Mill or John Rawls.

      The link Berlin finds between Romanticism and liberalism illustrates a more general truth. Neither traditions of thought nor the human beings that embody them are simple wholes, sealed off hermetically from one another. When the Romantics made a certain kind of purity into a supreme value they were devising a weapon that would be later used by enemies of humanity. At the same time they were shutting their eyes to the unexpected ways in which ideas – including their own – can mutate into their opposites.

      In explaining how this occurred, Berlin is doing more than fill in a neglected page in the history of thought. He is showing that we are all of us heirs of many traditions, carrying within us the contradictions of these intertwined strands of thought. We can no more rid ourselves of the formative influence of the Romantics than we can of the Enlightenment. Nor should we try, for, as Berlin puts it towards the close of the final lecture, ‘we are children of both worlds’.¹¹ Not the least among the paradoxes of this thought-stirring volume is the way that, in Berlin’s subtle reading, a Romantic doctrine that preached incessant conflict between self-enclosed cultures turns into a compelling defence of a civilised balance between rival values.

      ¹ ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784), Kant’s gesammelte Schriften (Berlin, 1900–), viii 23, line 22.

      ² 47 below; further references to the present volume are given by page number alone.

      ³ 31.

      ⁴ 27.

      ⁵ ibid.

      ⁶ 25.

      ⁷ xxii.

      ⁸ 136.

      ⁹ 169.

      ¹⁰ 170.

      ¹¹ 163.

      EDITOR’S PREFACE

      Every thing is what it is, and not another thing.

      Joseph Butler¹

      Everything is what it is […].

      Isaiah Berlin²

      BUTLER’S REMARK WAS AMONG Isaiah Berlin’s favourite quotations, and Berlin echoes it in one of his most important essays. I take it as my starting point here because the first thing to be said about the present volume, in order to dispel any possible misunderstanding, is that it is not in any degree the new work on Romanticism that Berlin had hoped to write ever since giving the (unscripted) A. W. Mellon Lectures on this subject, in March and April 1965, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. In the years that followed, especially after his retirement from the Presidency of Wolfson College, Oxford, in 1975, he continued to read widely with a book on Romanticism in mind, and a large mass of notes accumulated. In the last decade of his life he collected all his notes together in a separate room and started afresh on the task of pulling them together: he made a list of headings and began dictating on to cassette a selection of the notes, marshalling them under the headings as he went. He also considered using his material as a long introduction to an edition of work by E. T. A. Hoffmann rather than as a free-standing study of his own. But the new synthesis continued to elude him, perhaps partly because he had left it too late, and so far as I am aware not so much as a sentence of the intended work was ever written.

      Clearly it is a matter of great regret for his readers, as it certainly was for Berlin himself, that he did not write his revised account. But its absence is not all loss: had it been written, the present book, which is simply an edited transcript of the lectures, would never have been published; and there is a freshness and immediacy, an intensity and excitement in the transcript that would inevitably have been obscured, to some extent, in a carefully reworked and expanded version. There are several other unscripted lectures delivered by Berlin that survive as recordings or transcripts, and some of these can be directly compared either with published texts that derive from them, or with previously composed texts on which they are based. Such a comparison shows how the repeated revisions Berlin tended to undertake on the road to publication, for all that they enrich the intellectual content and precision of a work, can sometimes have a sobering effect on the extempore spoken word; or, conversely, it shows how a long underlying text – a ‘torso’ as Berlin called it – can acquire new life and directness when used as a source for a lecture not read from a prepared script. The lecture delivered from notes and the carefully constructed book are, one might say in pluralist terminology, incommensurable. In this case, for better or worse, only the former incarnation of one of Berlin’s central intellectual projects is available.

      The title I have used is one Berlin himself suggested at an early stage. It was supplanted by ‘Sources of Romantic Thought’ for the delivery of the lectures³ because in the opening pages of Saul Bellow’s novel Herzog, published in 1964, the hero, a Jewish academic called Moses Herzog who is undergoing a crisis of self-confidence, is struggling unsuccessfully to deliver a course of adult-education lectures in a New York night-school – lectures entitled precisely ‘The Roots of Romanticism’. This was merely a remarkable coincidence – Berlin denied any connection, and Saul Bellow later confirmed that he was right to do so: ‘I was writing a comic novel; I needed a title and picked one out of the air, as one is apt to do in novel-writing, never dreaming that this shadow-paragraph of a mere nothing would require investigation and would come back to haunt me. At the time, I knew Isaiah Berlin only by reputation. I had not yet met him.’⁴ In any event, the earlier title was certainly more resonant, and if there were any grounds for abandoning it at the time, they have by now surely disappeared.⁵

      Even if Berlin’s introductory remarks before he began the lectures proper are too occasional to appear in the body of the published text, they remain of some prefatory interest. Here, accordingly, is the greater part of them:

      These lectures are primarily intended for genuine experts on the arts – art historians and experts on aesthetics, amongst whom I cannot possibly count myself. My only valid excuse for choosing this subject is that the Romantic movement, naturally, is relevant to the arts: the arts, even though I know not very much about them, cannot be altogether kept out, and I promise not to keep them out beyond measure.

      There is a sense in which the connection between Romanticism and the arts is even stronger. If I can claim any qualification for talking about this subject, it is because I propose to deal with political and social life, and moral life as well; and it is true, I think, to say of the Romantic movement that it is not only a movement in which the arts are concerned, not only an artistic movement, but perhaps the first moment, certainly in the history of the West, when the arts dominated other aspects of life, when there was a kind of tyranny of art over life, which in some sense is the essence of the Romantic movement; at least, I propose to try to demonstrate that this is so.

      I should add that the interest of Romanticism is

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