Political romanticism
"Political Romanticism is a historical study that, like all of Schmitt's major works, offers a fundamental political critique. In it, he defends a concept of political action based on notions of good and evil, justice and injustice, and attacks the political passivity entailed by the romanticization of experience. The book has three strands. The first is an attack on received notions of the origins of the Romantic Movement. Schmitt argues that this movement represents a secularization, subjectification, and privatization in which God is replaced by the emancipated, private individual of the bourgeois social order. The second is an assault on political romanticism that includes a broader attack on the new European bourgeoisie, which Schmitt characterizes as the historical bearer of the movement. The third strand is a defense of political conservatism and a refutation of the view that political romanticism is intrinsically linked with romanticism. Here Schmitt argues that the political romantic is tied not to positions but to aesthetics, and can therefore as easily become a Danton as a Frederick the Great. Guy Oakes's introduction places the book in historical context and also suggests its continuing relevance through his discussion of the latest outcropping of political romanticism in the late 1960s, intriguingly brought out in his example of Norman Mailer as a political romantic." --Descripción del editor
History
xxxv, 177 p. ; 23 cm.
9780262691420, 9780262192521, 0262691426, 0262192527
1305063257
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 ; Muller'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 Realite ; The occasionalist structure of romanticism
3. Political romanticism: Survey of the development of theories of the state since 1796 ; 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 Muller'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 a difference between political 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 conception of the liberal bourgeoisie, exemplified by David Friedrich Strauss' Julian the Apostate
Conclusion: Political romanticism as the concomitant emotive response to political events
Traducción de: Politische Romantik