Hopeful Romantics
CrowdSource 2.24.2025
Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements, and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: the return — maybe — of romanticism.
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States of Yearning
Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature is a new exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, a big showing of the great Romantic painter’s sublime pictures of nature. Sebastian Smee argues that the show speaks to our time:
Romanticism is about yearning. In states of yearning, there is no middle ground. Stuck in the mundane present, we fix our gaze on the distance, where we hope there is something in which we might lose ourselves, which might offer absolution. […] Today, as in Friedrich’s time, we look for ways. It might be ocean swimming or running marathons. It might be death metal or stadium rock. It might be drugs, religion or the euphoric abasements of love.
Smee is the latest culture critic to claim that our age is full of romantic yearning.
Romanticism Now!
The doomerism surrounding AI, anger at the mind-sapping power of social media and sadness over the deterioration of the humanities has many clamoring for a return to Romanticism.
In November 2023,
imagined a new Romantic rebellion: “Imagine a growing sense that algorithmic and mechanistic thinking has become too oppressive. Imagine if people started resisting technology. Imagine a revolt against STEM’s dominance. Imagine people deciding that the good life starts with NOT learning how to code.”The following month,
, citing Gioia, wrote: “The new romanticism has arrived, butting up against and even outright rejecting the empiricism that reigned for a significant chunk of this century. Backlash is bubbling against tech’s dominance of everyday life, particularly the godlike algorithms — their true calculus still proprietary — that rule all of digital existence.”
The takes have since accumulated:
“Rx: Romanticism.”
says that a Romanticism gives us “way of thinking through how we may address these spiritual problems without devolving into the simplistic dichotomy of bipartisan politics.”Romantic Conservatism.
writes about his kind of conservatism, which is Romantic and reveres nature, and is inspired by the French Romantic writer, Chateaubriand: “As to nature, the original Romantic comportment towards it was not one of solemn stewardship, but of an almost pagan love, as when Chateaubriand allows a bit of the Druid in him to come out in his acknowledgment of kinship with the trees …”“Mysterious.”
’s much-discussed essay about the contemporary art world is not explicitly Romantic, but has been accused of being so, largely due to passages like this one: “I’d rather view art that tears open my consciousness, that opens portals into the mysterious. I like art the most when it doesn’t mean a thing, or otherwise when its beauty or strangeness transcends its subject.”Teach Your Children Well. Campbell Frank Scribner enjoins teachers to embrace Romanticism: “In our age of knowing cynicism, the Romantics remind us that young people are not only a sea of possibility but also a bedrock of belief, and indeed that the latter quality sustains the former.”
And last week,
repeated his clarion call: “What the new Romanticism does promise is a scrambling of Left vs. Right. Better to imagine the new age as either up vs. down, border vs. center, or unreality — or managed reality — against the light, water, air, and consciousness we’ve tried to protect.”
The Skeptics
Of course, there’s been some pushback.
Romanticism Flirts with Irrationalism.
critiques Ted Gioia: “it must be remembered that Romanticism was and still is ambivalent. It includes much that is irrationally mystical, skeptical of science, and antisemitic. Don’t we already have that in climate denialism, anti-vaccine sentiment, and the QAnon craziness?”Our Era is Not Actually Romantic. Historian
offers a different, non-Romantic view of the present cultural moment: “historical era seems to be kind of like that: an assemblage of contradictory replays of the past, recycling of shards from earlier eras that (may have?) had more distinctive, coherent vibes. This is what gives the present its frustrating, decadent, immobile feel, its flavor of frenetic, anxious paralysis …”You’re Not Actually Romantic. Critic
criticizes Dean Kissick: “But Kissick, alas, is no Novalis. His repeated descriptions of artists as ‘researchers’ hardly inspire fits of passion, and when he praises artists who display ‘the freedom of absolute purposelessness,’ he sounds less like the poet and more like the stodgy figure that the Romantics hoped to supplant: that giant of the Enlightenment, a man who was born middle-aged, Immanuel Kant.”Trump is a Romantic.
says that Romanticism is bad because it is the tyranny of feeling, and “Donald Trump is an amazing example of one form of the romantic spirit.”
What is Romanticism?
Some resources for our readers who are asking this question.
For the basics of Romanticism (nostalgia for the ancient past, love of nature, hope for revolution and, of course, romance), we recommend:
Going to the Caspar David Friedrich show at the Met or, if you don’t live in New York, looking up his paintings online;
Listening to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony;
Reading Friedrich Hölderlin’s novel, Hyperion.
As a secondary resource, Isaiah Berlin’s short book, The Roots of Romanticism, is a good place to start.
From the Crowd
Socialist essayist
(buy his latest book), responds to ’s article, “The Message and the Messenger”:
If WoC contributors weren’t so quick to slap leftist wrists with the admonition that “It’s more complex than that,” I wouldn’t feel the need to point out that in this case, it’s more complex than that. Germany is less than a hundred years from the worst regime in all of history, bar none. The foundation of that regime was a racial ideology that exalted Germanness and first disparaged, then murdered en masse, many varieties of non-German. The problem of how to prevent the resurgence of that lethal ideology while still guaranteeing free speech is a delicate one, and should not be an occasion for what is becoming a rather tired WoC gambit of schooling the Left.
See you next week!
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And no mention of the Butlerian Jihad...
This idea - the return of Romanticism - strikes me as odd. It seems interesting to people that spend their time thinking and writing about it. Cool, I guess. But I and most of the people I know are Romantics, it’s simply how we live life and appreciate it. It is folly to think that algorithms or political division, etc are that important, unless you have nothing else to talk about. If you’re trapped in that matrix, maybe that’s what you see and like to talk about, but it’s a strange word salad such folks spend their minds tossing.