The Triumph of Romanticism

The seventeenth-century Baroque synthesis of the divine-human relationship emphasized the primacy of the Christian God in the lives of all men as the basis for legitimate humanism. The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century tore apart the comp-onents, emphasizing matter over spirit and pushing God far away as a remote cosmic architect. In the first half of the nineteenth century, spirit prevailed once again over matter in Romanticism. This effervescent movement, opposed by a renewed scientific materialism, ended up fragmenting into utopianism, sentimentalism, psychologism, existentialism, and pessimism. The history of Romanticism is the story of an explosive creative force that always consumes itself. Such is the thesis of this ambitious historical and philosophical study, in which the author shows how thought and art forms from the end of the Napoleonic wars have left their mark on every aspect of the Western civilization we inhabit today. Its pages are a tour de force of cultural hi