In "The Roots of Romanticism," one of the twentieth century's most influential p
hilosophers 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 r
anges over a cast of some of the greatest thinkers and artists of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, including Kant, Rousseau, Diderot, Schiller, the Schl
egels, Novalis, Goethe, Blake, Byron, and Beethoven. The ideas and attitudes of
these and other figures, Berlin argues, helped to shape twentieth-century nation
alism, existentialism, democracy, totalitarianism, and our ideas about heroic in
dividuals, self-fulfillment, and the exalted place of art.
