Romanticism and Rousseau.

At the end of the 18^th century, the enlightenment was starting to get a little bit dry. For a long time, art, music and literature were all largely influenced by Christianity, which had taken a real stronghold over Europe. There had been great leaps in learning discovery (thanks to the invention of the printing press) and people were just generally starting to ‘know’ more. Everyone was very empirical, clever and boring.

  The Romantic Movement changed this idea of needing to know stuff, largely thanks to Rousseau. He believed that humans should be content with nature. He stated, ‘man is born free but everywhere is in chains’.  He believed that man is a ‘noble savage’ meaning that we should live as in a state of nature. Civilisation is restricting us from living our lives as they should be lived. He believes that we should step back to nature and live like the animals that we technically are. He struggled with the notion of truth, and said that nature is the only real truth. Rousseau realised that completely reverting to nature was unrealistic for humans, but suggested a way that he believed we could benefit from civilisation in his book, ‘the social contract’.

Here he suggests that people as a whole or ‘the sovereign’ as he refers to the idea should act in a way that benefits ‘the sovereign’. People’s individual wills are selfish, but what he calls ‘the general will’ would be beneficial to all. He recommends only a limited government that could intervene with regards to the distribution of property, in a similar fashion to Locke’s ideas.

This led to the idea of Romantic Nationalism, nations governing from the bottom up, and that geography should define a nation’s identity. He saw that ‘nations’ should be made up of small communities, none too big to be able to walk in a day.