Political romanticism

"A pioneer in legal and political theory, Schmitt traces the prehistory of political romanticism by examining its relationship to revolutionary and reactionary tendencies in modern European history. Both the partisans of the French Revolution and its most embittered enemies were numbered among the romantics. During the movement for German national unity at the beginning of the nineteenth century, both revolutionaries and reactionaries counted themselves as romantics. According to Schmitt, the use of the concept to designate opposed political positions results from the character of political romanticism: its unpredictable quality and lack of commitment to any substantive political position. The romantic person acts in such a way that his imagination can be affected. He acts insofar as he is moved. Thus an action is not a performance or something one does, but rather an affect or a mood, something one feels. The product of an action is not a result that can be evaluated according to moral standards, but rather an emotional experience that can be judged only in aesthetic and emotive terms. These observations lead Schmitt to a profound reflection on the shortcomings of liberal politics. Apart from the liberal rule of law and its institution of an autonomous private sphere, the romantic inner sanctum of purely personal experience could not exist. Without the security of the private realm, the romantic imagination would be subject to unpredictable incursions. Only in a bourgeois world can the individual become both absolutely sovereign and thoroughly privatized: a master builder in the cathedral of his personality. An adequate political order cannot be maintained on such a tolerant individualism, concludes Schmitt."--Provided by publisher.

Cover Page -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- Introduction to the Transaction Edition -- Translator's Introduction -- Preface -- Introduction -- The German conception: political romanticism as an ideology of reaction and restoration -- The French conception: romanticism as a revolutionary principle -- Rousseauism -- The explanation of revolution in terms of the esprit romantique and the esprit classique -- The confusion of the concept of political romanticism and the path to a definition -- 1 The Outward Situation -- The personal political significance of romantic writers in Germany -- Schlegel's political insignificance -- Müller's political development: an Anglophile in Gottingen, a feudal and estatist-conservative anticentralist in Berlin, a functionary of the absolutist centralized state in the Tyrol -- 2 The Structure of the Romantic Spirit -- La recherche de la Réalité -- The occasionalist structure of romanticism -- 3 Political Romanticism -- Survey of the development of theories of the state since -- The difference between the romantic conception of the state and the counterrevolutionary and legitimist conception -- The state and the king as occasional objects of romantic interest -- The romantic incapacity for ethical and legal valuation -- Romanticized ideas in political philosophy -- Adam Miiller's productivity: his mode of argumentation: the rhetorically formed resonance of significant impressions -- his antitheses: rhetorical contrasts -- The occasional character of all romanticized objects -- Brief indication of the difference between political 146 romanticism and a romantic politics: In the latter, it is the effect and not the cause that is occasional -- Excursus: the romantic as a political type in the 149 conception of the liberal bourgeoisie, exemplified by David Friedrich Strauss's Julian the Apostate