The art and legacy of the Romantic tradition: Implications for power, self-determination and administration

It has been most common for Romanticism to be regarded as a literary movement, best studied through literary criticism and history, a result partly of early twentieth-century analytic philosophy and related positivistic social sciences predisposed against its fundamental principles. However, Romanticism consists of an intellectual movement, falling roughly between 1760 and 1840, with broad implications for socio-political analysis. It serves as a predecessor to a variety of later disparate intellectual movements – Hegelianism, historicism, existentialism, phenomenology, hermeneutics – and a variety of artistic styles such as decadence, absurdism, surrealism, and DaDaism (all artistic movements oriented towards socio-political critique). The underlying precepts for the better-known literary authors were derived from such humanist philosophers as Rousseau, Fichte, Schelling, Jacobi, Herder, and Montesquieu, later influencing idealist and hermeneutic writers like Hegel and Gadamer.