I appreciate the fact that ISI is still exposing undergrads to an alternative universe, so to speak. Thanks. But I think “modern” Western romanticism needs to be put into a larger context. Romanticism in the West is one of many reactions to the trend toward a kind of cold intellectualism or humanism. Arguably, this intellectual coldness stems from “Scholasticism” in theology and philosophy. It has both left and right variants. Who would say, for example, that Rousseau is not the perfect romanticist who blames civilization for all the world’s problems? I think the “problem,” so to speak, runs deeper. The life of the intellect had been separated from the life of contemplation. In Western religious/political history, the contemplative life has been largely expunged, by force. This is why we see so much interest today in Asian forms of contemplation, yoga, Buddhist meditation, etc., not to mention drug use. All of this is quackery of course, but it is evidence that the intellect is not designed to be focused just on objects. So I think we would do better by introducing students (and ourselves) to the contemplative, meditative, and prayer traditions, of which a large body of empirical literature is extant, mostly in Greek, but a lot has been translated into English in recent years. I stress the word empirical because it was never a romantic movement. It is based on observation and experience in the best tradition of positive science. There is little or no institutional support for any recovery of traditional or classical contemplative theory and practice, but a lot of people are picking up books and actually reading them, and some are actually putting the advice into practice. Probably the best source for this is the Philokalia, which is a compilation of ancient Greek and Syriac texts on hesychasm by St. Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain in the latter 19th Century. One does not need a romantic movement to resist the intellectual coldness of the cultural environment. Nor does one necessarily need an attachment to place or custom in order to ground one’s resistance. There is a need, in fact, to revive the tradition of the peripatetic contemplative.

I considered devoting a good bit of space to work out the competing meanings and definitions of “romanticism,” but I decided that I wanted to try to understand Kirk on his own terms. I found it a powerful experience. Nonetheless, I do not think there is any hint of sentimentalism in my essay, and, moreover, I conclude with doubts (or hints of doubts) about a conservative project that rests so heavily on non-American sources.

Rob–you are correct. There is no meaningful romanticism (using any standard definition) that is also egalitarian.

To both of you, the use of the romantic label is helpful in a number of ways, even if it introduces some confusion. We live in an age where the simplifiers have largely won the language game and where no meaningful understanding of a moral imagination is possible. But people can still imagine that “romance” is possible. It is one of the few openings to a cluster of ideas otherwise utterly unbelievable in a utilitarian age.

Meanwhile, the kind of comments this essay has provoked have given me great hope–the kind of hope I’ve not felt in a some time.

Perhaps the existence of this tension is why many of us American conservatives who have that romantic, or at least imaginative, streak in us tend to be Anglophiles of one sort or another. It’s as if we need to, in a sense, go “elsewhere” for our inspiration. The British conservatives we admire — Burke, Chesterton, Lewis, Tolkien, Scruton, etc. — manage to pull the rational and the imaginative together in a way that is attractive, but at the same time also “workable.” And although neither Kirk nor Eliot were Brits, they were able to bring this off as well, to the point where people who aren’t very familiar with them often think they’re Englishmen.

Yet when it comes to American writers/thinkers who bring these strands together one could mention folks such as Flannery O’Connor, Marion Montgomery, Wendell Berry, Mark Helprin, and Anthony Esolen — strongly imaginative yet also highly rational, even tough-minded.

And note that none of these, whether English or American, is an egalitarian. I wouldn’t want to make too strong a case for it, but might one say, based on these observations and on what Ted has written here, that egalitarianism is the death of romance?

Second, @Micah, I echo your lament. The question plagues my mind daily, thanks to the illuminating (and imaginative) writing here on the Porch and elsewhere in my studies to find the social path less traveled – in my opinion, the better path. There are times when I feel as though stuck in a web impossible to escape-that being our very boring, unromantic, cold and efficient culture. If only to step out for a moment, but sometimes I fear that it is inevitable for us to remain in this world colored gray.

As for Orthodoxy, it is a remarkable work. The postmodern critic Slavoj Zizek has adopted it as a postmodern work, and he may be right. When one picks up a book with a title like that, one might expect something that begins with “first principles” and procedes on the basis of ratiocination. But Chesterton’s writes of a journey from Hanwell to home, from madness to sanity, and the story of Orthodoxy is primarily a narrative. On the one hand, this surprises us; on the other it shouldn’t, since so many of us subscribe to a faith that begins with a biography, four of them in fact, about the same person. And that biography itself resides within a book that is mostly a collection of stories.

Or perhaps, romances.

I wonder if these roots and connections aren’t easier to absorb in the European context, where you have someone like Chateaubriand who is both the father of French Romanticism and one of the founders of French conservatism. So much of his thinking comes spending his youth embedded in a creedal/honor culture, and experiencing the destruction of that culture by systematizers trying to immanentize the eschaton. Quite often I’ll read something here and be reminded of something Chateaubriand or Musset, or even de Maistre wrote.

Another thing that comes to mind is J.G.Ballard’s repeated warnings that the future might well be endless boredom punctuated by meaningless violence.

A fine essay, one of the best here of recent note. McAllister, this one’s a homer.

My libertarian sentiments, and they are many, are tempered by an avowed romantic streak, fusty old varmint that I is. It remains interesting to me how Plato banished the poets from his ideal polity… Because, of course, as ole Ed Abbey asserted :”Only the half mad are wholly alive”. Can there be such a mad thing as a poetic libertarian? “Don’t Tread on Me” seems a fine anthem for any poet.

Perhaps this is why I enjoy this electronic porch to such an intemperate extent, it is a veritable carnival of eccentrics, battering away at one another and hopefully….at the end of the day, agreeing, disagreeing but above all else, looking to reinvigorate that marvelous human possibility of community, gainful community…a community of people enriched with a life engaging both hand and mind.