Author Insight Video

Transcript

Two of the most important developments in European and American thought in the 18th and 19th centuries were the emergence of Enlightenment rationalism, as it was called, during the 18th century and then the emergence of Romanticism in the 19th century.

Romanticism was in some respects a continuation of the Enlightenment but in other respects in was in opposition to the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment represented the emergence of reason as a powerful force in shaping thought and culture. Reason, rather than the strict controls of organized religion and absolute monarchy that had taken place in Western Europe for centuries. The Enlightenment rationalists rebelled against restrictions placed on thought and intellectual life by the church and by the state until t he 18th century. Instead, they wanted to free intellectual life, to explore all dimensions of the natural world, to try to understand the laws of nature, and use the capacity of reason to investigate the universe unrestricted by religions beliefs or regulations.

Romantics, like many of the Enlightenment rationalists, believed that the individual human being was capable of perfection through the capacity of reason and through the exploration of one’s emotional and spiritual side. They believed that human society could be improved by allowing the individual to flourish and flower in all directions.

In America the Romantic Movement emerged first on the east coast and was centered in the Boston area among a group of poets, philosophers, ministers, and writers who came together for regular meetings. They called themselves the Transcendental Club and have since come to be known as the Transcendentalists, the two most famous of whom are Ralph Waldo Emerson, a poet-philosopher and former minister, and Henry David Thoreau, his protŽgŽ, who himself was a distinguished thinker, writer, poet, and philosopher who made a famous experiment in simple living and romantic reflection at Walden Pond.

The Transcendentalist wanted to literally transcend the limitations of rational thinking, of rational behavior, and explore how best to have their romantic side emerge. They were individualists. They were very much rebels against authority. But at the same time, they were reformers promoting a whole array of improvements in American society, the most radical of which was the abolition of slavery.

By the 1830’s and 1840’s, Romanticism was flowering in virtually every area of American cultural life—in poetry, in fiction, in art. It was a very powerful force in shaping the contours of American life. Enlightenment rationalism and Romanticism both became powerful currents in shaping the contours of American thought and culture throughout the 19th century. At times intersecting, at times diverging, they were the two most powerful threads in forming the fabric of the American experience.