At least two: The modernity of science and technology, the factory system and city planning, of bureacracy and management. And on the other hand the modernity of sensibility, literature, hedonism, the lust for ever-new experience. On the one hand, Industrialization; on the other, the Romanticism that challenged it. On the one hand, modern urban architecture; on the other, the modernism of an Eliot who sees an inferno in the modern city.
And yet, perhaps one: British Romantic poets supported the French revolution and fought alongside Greek nationalists; Romantics saw themselves opening a new world of endless possibility; Romantics were as at home with the autonomous individual as Descartes. Romanticism was in revolt against neo-classicism, and hence against antiquity (at least as interpreted by classicists). Romanticism celebrated the change, presentness, and relativity that Baudelaire later described as modernite.
The paradox of Romanticism, as stated by Kumar: Romanticism is the parent of modernism, yet both are “close to the very aspects of modernity . . . that they are generally held to have so vehemently protested against.”
Peter Leithart
Peter J. Leithart is President of Theopolis Institute. He is the author of numerous books on theology, literature, and culture, including Theopolitan, Defending Constantine, and Baptized Body.
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