In the course of the evolving modern era, philosophical and literary Romanticism has in various intellectual and political discussions been subjected to radical criticism. From Hegel (The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, 1801; The Phenomenology of Spirit, 1807) to Carl Schmitt (Political Romanticism, 1919, ²1925) and Georg Lukács (The Destruction of Reason, 1954), one finds recurrent and severely critical challenges especially to the Romantic form of subjectivity and its relation to reality. Such critical engagement with Romanticism reveals itself to be a part of modernity’s cultural self-understanding. The process of modernization is in the one hundred and fifty years of radical criticism of Romanticism not to be understood as a linear development. Modernity seems rather to be a conflicted dynamic texture of heterogeneous impulses, values, and institutional patterns and practices, all of which build upon and react to one another. Time and again, the historical agents involved re-negotiate these fundamental conflicts in varying historical constellations. Modernity is inherently conflicted and is characterized by “tensions of ambivalence” (Sigmund Freud); it takes place in a recurrent process of problem solving and -creation.

Taking into account these radical criticisms, this project reconstructs the various contentious issues, the ways they are debated and the shifting constellations of conflict in the modern era. In doing so, it analyses the potential and epistemic value of these conflicts for present times.

-> For the current Fellow year

-> Find other Fellows