Liberalism in a Romantic State

Abstract

This article explores the connections between liberalism and romanticism, and argues that there is a split within liberal thought between a rationalist conception of liberalism, which relies on traditional moral psychology, and romanticist versions of liberalism, which adopt the romantic critique of reason and attach a positive value to the supposedly “irrational” faculties of the human psyche, such as passion, emotion, and love. Attending to this split within liberal theory provides us with a deeper understanding of what motivates religious fundamentalism and the more general movement of “return to traditional values” in religious and socially conservative quarters. Fundamentalists and other socially and religiously conservative critics of liberalism perceive that the embrace of a romantic picture of human psychology, and the implementation of doctrines of individual freedom and choice in the realm of marital and sexual relations (in the realm of love) undermines the premises of traditional moral psychology, which insists that “the passions” be subordinated to the faculty of human reason. Paradoxically, religion (a religious conservatism in particular) appears in this face-off between romantic and rationalist conceptions of human psychology and freedom on the side of reason. Religious conservatives attack (romantic) liberalism precisely because they perceive liberalism to constitute an assault on reason and morality. Liberalism has responded to this conservative attack by entering even further into a romantic state, in particular, the romantic state of war. War, love, and religion are the three domains of human experience in which the contrast between romantic and rationalist conceptions of human psychology and freedom is sharpest. Liberalism at war, liberalism in love, and liberalism on faith are the subjects of this Commentary.