Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism. The A. W.

Mellon Lectures in the Fine

Arts, edited by Henry Hardy. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1999,
xvi +171pp.
If you ever thought you had a romantic streak in you, of which you wished to be cured, then
you should definitely read this book. You will undoubtedly recognize here whatever of the
romantic may engage you, see the dangers and various slippery slopes this puts you onand
the book will help bring you back to the straight and narrow. You will become very much
clearer on the varieties of romanticism, its sources or roots, and possible outcomes, having
read this book; and you will see, too, what limiting and unintended benefits romanticism has
brought to the world. At the least, such results may be expected, if you are already more or
less convinced that romanticism is a great danger needing to be eliminated, and especially if
you are already a devotee of Berlin’s unique and engaging style and outlook on intellectual
history. However, for those less so inclined, the results may be more mixed—as we shall see.
This is certainly not an easy book to comprehend or summarize, partly because of Berlin’s
impressive erudition, but also because the topic itself is so slippery. There seems always to be
some new wrinkle which might be considered, and perhaps should be considered; and likely
the greatest lapse of Berlin’s design is the very brief treatment it gives to romanticism in
music. As for the details of the scholarly evaluation and summary of various literary and
philosophical works of romantic origin, these are matters for the experts. In the present
volume the reader is left without any developed scholarly apparatus, though references for
some of the quotations are helpfully provided by the editor. The task of arriving at a fuller
evaluation of the claims of this book will surely drive the reader to the important related
works which Berlin published during his life time.

These 6 lectures were originally delivered at the National Gallery of Art, Washington,
D.C., in 1965, and the present book is the edited transcript of Berlin’s lectures. They have
been put into the present form by Henry Hardy of Oxford University. This is not, then, the
book on romanticism on which Berlin long labored in the last decade of his life. That book
remained unwritten. As Hardy puts the matter in his Editor’s Preface, “the new synthesis con-
tinued 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”(p. x). We have here only the
“torso” of “one of Berlin’s central intellectual projects,” though the lack of a more fully
developed book is compensated in degree by “freshness and immediacy” and the “intensity
and excitement in the transcript”(p. x). Hardy remarks, in Berlin’s words written for the
German edition of The Magus of the North (1995), that it is now time for Berlin’s view of the
matter “to be accepted or refuted by the critical reader”(p. xvi).
What is romanticism, then, and what should we think of it? In the opening lecture Berlin
refuses the task of definition, pointing to the variability of the subject matter and the likeli-
hood that whatever is proposed as distinguishing romanticism will in fact be found in other
sources: not merely in Coleridge and Wordsworth, say, but even “finally in Racine and Pope
themselves”(p. 1). Still, we do say something of significance using the term, and the topic is
one of undoubted importance from Berlin’s perspective. “The importance of romanticism is
that it is the largest recent movement to transform the lives and the thought of the Western
World,” and “…it is the greatest single shift in the consciousness of the West that has
occurred…”(p. 1). Berlin proceeds by a method of contrasting paradigms, which may yield no
 2

formal definition, but which is still intended to chart out and survey the territory. Before fol-
lowing Berlin into his survey, however, it will be useful to look at the approximate charac-
terization he does later offer and to understand something of the opposite paradigm of the
Western classical or non-romantic. A nagging doubt concerning Berlin’s opening historical
characterization of romanticism is introduced, early on, when he mentions that two previous
Mellon lecturers, Herbert Read and Kenneth Clark “have taken the position that romanticism
is a permanent state of mind which might be found anywhere”(p. 5). If that is so, we would
not expect to be able to locate romanticism geographically and historically in quite the way
that Berlin proposes, and we might also suspect that a less historically oriented conception of
the subject matter would stand a better chance of explaining the bothersome counter-examples
at the prospect of which Berlin complains. One may begin to wonder: If Jacob Boehme is a
romantic or predecessor, and Fichte and Schelling, and also Byron, Coleridge and Words-
worth are paradigmatic romantics, then why not count Plotinus and perhaps Plato too?

In the opening pages of the final lecture, titled “The Lasting Effects,” Berlin offers a char-
acterization of romanticism by means of two propositions which the romantic accepts, or
toward which romanticism is viewed as tending. The first is “the notion of the indomitable
will: not knowledge of values, but their creation, is what men achieve. You create values, you
create goals, you create ends, and in the end, you create your own vision of the universe,
exactly as artists create works of art…”(p. 119). “The second proposition—connected with
the first—is that there is no structure of things. There is no pattern to which you must adapt
yourself. There is only, if not the flow, the endless self-creation of the universe”(p. 119). The
names directly available on the same page are those of Fichte and Schelling; and, indirectly,
reference is made to prior discussions of these two philosophers. But the two propositions are
generalized interpretive claims and not quotations. Berlin clearly sees the developed or meta-
physical conception of “will” as central to romanticism, and the dominant role which he
assigns to the will in romanticism correlates with the attribution of a structureless or protean
world, situated over and against the will, and suited to be formed and re-formed by this domi-
nating force. One will surely think of Schopenhauer’s thesis of “The World as Will and
Representation,” or Nietzsche’s “will to power,” though in fact, Berlin chiefly concerns him-
self in the lectures with figures and developments which are more remote from us than
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche—often literary expressions of early romanticism or material
drawn from contemporaries of Kant, such as Hamann and Herder. What is central for present
purposes, however, is to understand this brief, two-pronged characterization of romanticism in
contrast with the contrary paradigm in Berlin’s account.
The opposite paradigm is classicism or as Berlin sometimes puts the matter, the “jigsaw
puzzle” conception of life or of nature, according to which, we already have significant frag-
ments of some overall truth and there must be some way of putting all the fragments together.
Berlin sums up the concept, which the romantics attacked, in three propositions, at the start of
the 2nd lecture “The First Attack on Enlightenment.” The three propositions found expression
in the Enlightenment of the 18th century, but they are broader, constituting “the three legs
upon which the whole Western tradition rested”(p. 21). “First, that all genuine questions can
be answered, that if a question cannot be answered it is not a question;” this first proposition,
according to Berlin, “is common both to Christians and to scholastics, to the Enlightenment
and to the positivist tradition of the twentieth century;” this proposition, says Berlin, is the
“backbone of the main Western tradition, and it is this that romanticism cracked”(p. 21). The
second proposition is “that all these answers are knowable; and they can be discovered by
means which can be learned and taught to other persons…,” and the third proposition is that
“all the answers must be compatible with one another, for if they are not compatible, then
chaos will result” (p. 22).
 3

Berlin allows for a great deal of internal disagreement and diversity of opinion and intel-
lectual inclinations among the representatives of the Enlightenment and among the broader
Western tradition from which it took form. However, he insists that the three propositions
were central both to the Enlightenment and to the Western intellectual tradition in general.
Thus an attack on the three propositions could not help but produce a very significant cultural
and intellectual discontinuity. Those united in holding to the three propositions might and did
otherwise differ as atheists or theists, optimists or pessimists concerning the proclivities of
human nature; in their diversity they took in more authoritarian political positions, suggesting
that human beings needed a “strenuous discipline” in order to be able to cope with life but
also more libertarian positions. Regarding the major figures and themes of the Enlightenment
in particular, Berlin writes as follows:

Broadly speaking, it could be said that it was Voltaire and his friends, people like Helvėtius,
people like Fontenelle, who represented the major position of the age, and this was that we were
progressing, we were discovering, we were destroying ancient prejudice, superstition, ignorance
and cruelty, and we were well on the way toward establishing some kind of science which
would make people happy, free, virtuous and just. It was this that was attacked by the persons I
shall turn to next (p. 30).

We will recognize the kind of position here as one which still engages our contemporaries, I
think; and the more systematic payoff which Berlin’s work seems to promise includes a per-
spective on the evaluation of our contemporary representatives of enlightenment thought.
Though Berlin paints a very dark picture of the romantics, in spite of that, he sees great
defects in the Enlightenment as well. One might certainly take the view, for instance, that the
excesses of the French Revolution, guided as it was by the French Enlightenment, demon-
strate some deep defects in the connected conceptions of mankind, reason, and the world.
Nineteenth century romanticism developed out of the reaction against the French Revolution
in significant degree, and as one might suspect, Berlin draws his critical perspective on the
Enlightenment partly from its romantic critics. Yet Berlin distinguishes himself from the ex-
cesses of the romantics, quite properly, and in no uncertain terms.
One sees the particular flavor of Berlin’s critical perspective on both romanticism and on
Enlightenment rationalism, very clearly, in the closing paragraphs of the final lecture. To see
Berlin at his best we often need a longer sample:

Here are the romantics, whose chief burden is to destroy ordinary tolerant life, to destroy phil-
istinism, to destroy common sense, to destroy the peaceful avocations of men, to raise every-
body to some passionate level of self-expressive experience, of such a kind as perhaps only
divinities, in older works of literature, were supposed to manifest. This is the ostensible sermon,
the ostensible purpose of romanticism, whether among the Germans or in Byron or among the
French, or whoever it may be; and yet, as a result of making clear the plurality of values, as a
result of driving wedges into the notion of the classical ideal, of the single answer to all ques-
tions, of the rationalisabilty of everything, of the answerability of all questions, of the whole jig-
saw-puzzle conception of life, they have given prominence to and laid emphasis upon the
incompatibility of human ideals. But if these ideals are incompatible, then human beings sooner
or later realize that they must make do, the must make compromises, because if they seek to
destroy others, others will seek to destroy them: and so as a result of this passionate, fanatical,
half-made doctrine, we arrive at an appreciation of the necessity of tolerating others, the neces-
sity of preserving an imperfect equilibrium in human affairs, the impossibility of driving human
beings so far into the pen which we have created for them, or into the single solution which pos-
ses us, that they will ultimately revolt against us, or at any rate be crushed by it (p. 146).

We may well doubt that it was inevitably the aim of romanticism or of all romantics, “to
destroy ordinary tolerant life, to destroy philistinism, to destroy common sense, to destroy the
 4

peaceful avocations of men,” and “to raise everybody to some passionate level of self-expres-
sive experience.” One might certainly expect to sort out something of the better and the worse
among the romantics by reference to such aims, however. Berlin certainly documents the ex-
cesses of romanticism in these directions. The general concept may in fact be much too vague
for us to expect much more. We see in the passage above that Berlin also wants to take some-
thing of value from romanticism, in contrast to the Enlightenment rationalism which
proceeded it. The romantics, according to Berlin, “have given prominence to and laid empha-
sis upon the incompatibility of human ideals;” and this point from the romantics is very
important in understanding the kind of pluralism and tolerance which Berlin defends. The
question may well arise at this point, however, as to whether the idea of human life based on
“pluralism and tolerance” is itself another variety of the great “single solution” about which
Berlin complains—regarding Enlightenment versions. At the least, we might expect that
pluralism and tolerance may be subject to perusal in too forceful or crusading a manner.
Again, if as Berlin maintains, the incompatibility of various human values and ideals has not
always been sufficiently appreciated by Western thought in its Enlightenment styles, then this
may certainly suggest great dangers in the rush for ever-expanding human contacts and inter-
action in a globalizing world economy.
The burden which Berlin took up for himself in the lectures, however, was first to demon-
strate the excesses of both the Enlightenment and the romantic movement, and secondly to
demonstrate that there is something of value which we need to preserve from each. Fuller
evaluation of the present book depends, then, largely upon the accuracy of the contrasting
accounts of the excesses of both the Enlightenment and of the romantic reaction against it. As
I say, these are questions for experts, though in broad outlines the arguments seem reasonably
secure.

Lecture 3 “The True Fathers of Romanticism,” opens with a discussion of Johann Georg
Hamann, to whom, Berlin subsequently devoted a book, The Magus of the North (1993).
According to Berlin in the lectures, Hamann was “the first person to declare war upon the
Enlightenment in the most open, violent and complete fashion” (p. 46). Henry Hardy, who
also edited Berlin’s book on Hamann, remarks in his Editor’s Preface to that volume, that
though some reworking of Berlin’s early notes was involved in producing the text, the
improvements were not a matter of a systematic revision “to take full account of more recent
work on Hamann;” and he adds that this more recent work “does not invalidate its central
theses” (See, Isaiah Berlin, The Magus of the North, p. xi, note 1). One still might expect that
there have been improvements or revisions of Berlin’s views of Hamann since the time when
he wrote the 1965 lectures on The Roots of Romanticism. Berlin is clear that Hamann’s
thought is based in pietistic religion and that it expresses an anti-scientific approach to life’s
problems. According to Hamann, says Berlin, “God was not a geometer, not a mathematician,
but a poet”(p. 48). This is a familiar romantic motif. One may wonder however, if some of
what Berlin says about Hamann gets repeated in his subsequent discussions. The following
passage strikes me as especially of interest. Taking off from Hamann’s disdain for the idea of
a finished science, in the prior paragraph, Berlin says the following:

This is the heart of Hamann’s doctrine. It is a kind of mystical vitalism which perceives in
nature and in history the voice of God. That the voice of God speaks to us through nature was an
old mystical belief. Hamann added to this the further doctrine that history too speaks to us that
all the various historical events which are simply taken to be ordinary empirical events by un-
enlightened historians are really methods whereby the Divine speaks to us. Each of these events
possess an occult or mystical significance which those with eyes to perceive can perceive (p.
49).
 5

One might certainly fault this doctrine on the basis of the prospect that it would tend to
encourage endless and intensive speculation, seeking to find the voice of Providence in every-
thing under the sun, and in the anti-fallibilistic moods of some small, closed group of true
believers, the resulting doctrines might indeed be destructive of the larger society: by encour-
aging people, in Berlin’s words, “to destroy ordinary tolerant life, to destroy philistinism, to
destroy common sense,” and “to destroy the peaceful avocations of men.” But given the
prevalence of related ideas, from the neo-Platonic doctrine of divine “emanations” onward
one might be inclined to doubt that it is specifically the doctrine of Hamann, or of other
romantics, which is the basic problem leading to all manner of romantic excess. One might
suppose, for instance that the English Puritans were no less convinced of their ability and duty
to hear the voice of God in the world and in history, though they are not therefore regarded as
equally deserving a place among the “roots of romanticism.”
Or consider Emerson, whose pantheism, not unlike that of Goethe (who is no romantic by
Berlin’s lights), certainly seeks the voice of God, “the Over-soul” in nature and in human
events and culture. Yet in Emerson, this doctrine was consistent with his first leaving the
church of his fathers and later proposing a “religion of science:” the speculative excesses of
romantic thought get subjected, first, to scholarly evaluation, and the prospect is that they are
eventually to be subjected to scientific scrutiny in some fashion. Again, though Emerson was
undoubtedly the first figure of American romanticism, we may doubt that he was an enemy of
“ordinary tolerant life,” that he aimed “to destroy philistinism,” or “to destroy common
sense,” and “to destroy the peaceful avocations of men.” Quite the contrary.
More directly to the present point: though Berlin repeats his case for Hamann’s prejudice
against science and of his seeking the voice of God, the later point seems not to be “the heart
of Hamann’s doctrine” in the account to be found in The Magus of the North, and one might
therefore be more inclined to doubt that this is the specific source or “origin of modern
irrationalism.” In some contrast with the earlier account, there is emphasis in the later account
on the idea that “God is inscrutable.” (See Berlin, The Magus of the North, p. 56f.) If God is
inscrutable, to us, then this certainly leaves room for some humility about our claims to hear
the voice of God.
The pietism of Hamann’s background (also found in Kant’s background) is a puritanical
version of Lutheranism, similar in many ways to the puritanisms which developed in the
English-speaking world under the influence of the French and Swiss Protestantism of John
Calvin. We know enough of the history of Puritanism to be wary of its tendency toward
cultural uniformity and determined theocracy—as in the American experience of Puritan New
England or the Puritan English Commonwealth of Cromwell. Pietism was the corresponding
17th century religious movement, originating in Germany, in reaction to formalism and intel-
lectualism in religion, and which stressed Bible study and personal religious experience: to
use the American and British word, pietism seems to be a German or historically Lutheran
variety of evangelicalism. Its tendency was more anti-political, though, and one might com-
pare it with Roger Williams rejection of the New England Puritan theocracy.
I am reminded of a passage in R.W. Emerson’s English Traits, which describes English
religion partly on the basis of its tendency toward the formation of sects. “Religious persons
are driven out of the Established Church into sects,” says Emerson, “which instantly rise to
credit, and hold the Establishment in check.” Given such experience, or such expectations, why
should we not equally expect the German pietists to have provided a needed restraint on the ex-
cesses of their establishment? But, consistent in degree with Berlin’s approach to Hamann, reli-
gious “sects” (and there is little of the polite American talk of “denominations”) are frequently
viewed as constituting a social, and potentially, a political threat in Germany even to this day.
This seems to be a significant part of the wider context of Berlin’s criticisms of Hamann. Why is
this? Why should a proliferation of sects seem threatening in Germany, when it seems neutral or
even productive of constraint and mutual tolerance elsewhere? Again, why should Hamann’s
 6

pietism figure so strongly in the roots of romanticism, though other varieties of Puritanism find
no similar place?
Related points may be approached in a slightly different way. The question the reader of these
lectures may wish to pose to Berlin is somewhat like a question we might pose to Edmund
Burke. The American Revolution, like the French Revolution, is a product of the Enlightenment.
So, how is it then that Burke and his present day followers and admirers can be so approving of
the American Revolution and so very critical of the French Revolution? This question is perhaps
easier to answer, and I do not intend to put the conventional answers in question. Still, this ques-
tion provides a model for a more difficult question, since so many related factors are involved. If
we may justly take important lessons from the romantic revolt against the Enlightenment, while
retaining our loyalty to the Enlightenment, then how or why is it that the German reaction was so
much more excessive than the romantic reaction elsewhere—in such a way as to draw Berlin’s
scholarly attention to otherwise obscure figures from the early years of German romanticism?
Berlin does briefly sketch an approach to a political or sociological explanation of the ori-
gin of romanticism and its excesses. This is to be found in the final chapter on “The Lasting
Effects,” where Berlin speculates on the specifically German origins of romanticism and its
relation to the Prussian State in particular. The idea here is that romanticism, or its German
extremes and excesses, arose from a kind of intellectual underclass in a situation where
“social distinctions were preserved in the most rigorous manner,” and “too many jobs in Prus-
sia were held by persons of good birth,” with the consequence that the romantics-to-be, often
sons of the clergy or of the civil servants, “were not able to attain full expression of their
ambitions, and therefore did become somewhat frustrated, and began to breed fantasies of
every possible kind”(p. 131). Concerning the class of men from which romanticism arose,
Berlin says:

They were easily snubbed, they had to serve as tutors to great men, they were constantly full of
insult and oppression. It is clear that they were confined and contracted in their universe; they
were like Schiller’s bent twig, which always jumped back and hit its bender. There was some-
thing about Prussia, where most of them came fromabout this excessively paternalistic State
of Fredrick the Great’s, about the fact that he was a mercantilist and therefore increased the
wealth of Prussia, increased her army, made her the most powerful and rich of German States,
but at the same time pauperized her peasants and did not allow sufficient opportunity to most of
her citizens (p. 131).

It is not Enlightenment alone which engendered the excesses of romantic reaction, then, but
instead the excesses of “enlightened” regimentation and system combined with a tradition of
rigid social distinction and advantage. If we take this approach to an explanation of the ex-
cesses of romanticism, then, the thesis of a specific role for German pietism, distinctive from
the general run of Puritan doctrines, seems not to be required. Excesses of particularisms arise
from excesses of prior universalisms—a kind of claim that would be consistent with Berlin’s
pluralistic and laudable resistance to the universalistic and rationalistic temptation to ignore or
ride roughly over the “incompatibilities” of distinctive cultures, values, and ideals. Just as we
may plausibly view the mildness or “conservative” character of the American Revolution, in
contrast to that of the French, in the context of the relatively mild Imperial system which was
over thrown in the American case, so the relative lack of extremes in various versions of
romanticism would be a function of the lack of extremes in corresponding “Enlightenment” or
rationalistic political and social systems: To avoid the extremes of romantic reaction, one
must also avoid the extremes of regimentation, overly rational system, and of encrusted social
advantage.
Where this proved possible, Puritanism, e.g., evolved into less troublesome forms—as in
early America—away from theocracy in the direction of the separation of church and state,
independent congregationalism, the rationalistic elements of Unitarianism, Emerson, etc.
 7

From any similar perspective, to see Emerson as closely akin to the excesses of European
romanticism would be a great mistake.
Still, there are important and more general parallels between European and American
developments, if we consider, for instance, the inability of America’s original and innovative
enlightenment constitutional system to solve the twin problems of slavery and sectionalism
which brought on the Civil War. Though there was fallibilistic provision to amend the
constitution to meet emerging problems and provision as well for the representation of the
distinctive interests of North and (non-African-American) South, in spite of this, the sectional
passions, and the racially based system of social advantage and exploitation, nearly tore the
country in two. The profoundly enlightened constitutional provisions of the founding fathers,
upon which we rely in considerable degree, even to the present day, were not sufficient to
avoid a long, bloody, and destructive Civil War. Might we not helpfully regard this point, in
the light of Berlin’s discussions, in terms of a beginning period of “universalistic” enlighten-
ment (not without its systematic ambition of continental scale and including grave inequali-
ties), followed by corresponding excesses of vigorously contending “romantic” sectional
particularisms? We are accustomed to blame the Civil War on the evil racial-caste system of
slavery, but were there also overly rationalistic constitutional assumptions regarding the
capability of our centralized institutions to span, encompass, and reconcile great social and
moral diversity on a scale of enormous continental distances?

The Roots of Romanticism is an important book and provides important documentation of

Berlin’s early work on related themes. The book is important, if for no other reason, because
it draws us further into the corpus of Berlin’s writings in order to more closely trace and
evaluate the themes and arguments. Moreover, in raising or suggesting questions, of the sorts
briefly broached above, Berlin shows us again the fruitfulness of his work and his facility to
help bring us face to face with important difficulties and perplexities which linger on among
us. Though you may agree or disagree with the specifics of Berlin’s analysis on this point or
that, there is simply no doubting Berlin’s wide comprehension, his daunting focus, and the
probingly intelligent treatment of the themes.

H.G. Callaway

Mainz
November 2003