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Romanticism and Classicism: Deep Structures in Social Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Alvin W. Gouldner

Extract

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The “modern” only begins to manifest itself when, in answer to the question, What is distinctively human?, Romanticism replies not by referring to man's eternal capacity for reason and universal rationality, but, ‘instead, to his creative originality, to his individuated capacity to feel and to dream uniquely. The modern begins to emerge when man is seen, not merely as a creature that can discover the world, but also as one who can create new meanings and values, and can thus change himself and fundamentally transform his world, rather than unearth, recover, or “mirror” an essentially unchanging world order.

Type
Notes and Discussion
Information
Diogenes , Volume 21 , Issue 82 , June 1973 , pp. 88 - 107
Copyright
Copyright © 1973 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

References

1 Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, New York, 1971, p. 214. Here Lukacs suggests (and it is no more than that here) that "the concept of ‘organic growth' was converted from a protest against reification into an increasingly reactionary slogan." Lukás would later stress the reactionary outcome of Romanticism. But this creates grave difficulties for him as a Marxist, particularly an Hegelianizing Marxist, for he sees that both Solger and Friedrich Schlegel's work on "irony" make them pioneers of the "dialecti cal method between Schelling and Hegel…" Ibid., p. 215.

2 Mannheim's main analysis of Romanticism, convergent with the later Lukács, deals with it in the framework of an analysis of conservative thought; see Ch. V of K. A. Wolff (ed.), From Karl Mannheim, London, 1971.

3 F. Markham (ed.), Henri Saint-Simon: Social Organization, The Science of Man and Other Writers, New York, 1964, p. 42; see also pp. xxx-xxxi.

4 Henri Lefebvre, The Sociology of Marx, New York, 1968, p. 22.

5 R. W. Friedrichs, A Sociology of Sociology, New York, 1970; see espe cially his discussions of the "prophetic" and "priestly" modes of sociology. See also A. W. Gouldner, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology, New York, 1970, esp. 254, etc

6 Hans-Georg Gadamer, "On the Scope and Function of Hermeneutical Reflection," Continuum, Vol. 8, No. 1, Spr.-Summer, 1970, p. 80.

7 Richard E. Palmer, Hermeneutics, Evanston, 1969. See esp. Ch.6-7.

8 Gadamer, op. cit., p. 90.

9 Paul Lorenzen, "Enlightenment and Reason," Continuum, ibid., p. 5.

10 George Lichtheim, From Marx to Hegel, New York, 1971. Lichtheim speaks of "the introduction by Lenin of a species of voluntarism which had more in common with Bergson and Nietzsche than with Engels' own rather deterministic manner of treating historical types," p. 67.

11 F. Schlegel, A Course of Lectures on Modern History, London, 1849, p. 298.

12 Cf. George Lichtheim, ibid., "Max Weber's sociology was taking shape as part of an attempt to overcome the cleavages between scientific rationalism and romantic intuitionism." p. 201. Of all those currently concerned with such matters, Lichtheim has by far the best insight into the importance of Romanticism for modern social theory, academic and Marxist, although he has not yet consolidated his understanding of Romanticism and is far too ready to reduce it to Nazism.

13 J. W. Burrow, Evolution and Society, Cambridge, 1966 p. xv.

14 J. W. Bennett, "Myth, Theory, and Value in Cultural Anthropology," in Count and Bowles (eds.), Fact and Theory in Social Science, Syracuse, 1964.

15 B. G. Glaser and A. L. Strauss, The Discovery of Grounded Theory, Chicago, 1967.

16 Mead's fullest confrontation with Romanticism and his most systematic expression of his understanding of it is to be found in his much neglected Movements of Thought in the 19th Century, M. H. Moore (ed.), Chicago, 1936.

17 A. Strauss (ed.), The Social Psychology of George Herbert Mead, Chicago, 1959, p. vii.