The purpose of this research is to examine connections in intellectual history between the ideas of the Enlightenment and those of Romanticism, through the work of Franklin L. Baumer, James MacGregor Burns, and Francis Fukuyama. The plan of the research will be to set forth the thesis, assumption, and evidence of Baumer regarding the relationships between the Enlightenment and Romantic ways of thinking, and then to discuss how Burns's ideas of moral and transformational leadership and Fukuyama's ideas of social philosophy may be said to reflect Baumer's elaboration of continuity and change in Western thought since the period following the late Renaissance.
Any examination of the Enlightenment and Romanticism as critical forces in European intellectual history involves looking at decisive forces that have shaped individual and mass consciousness from the time that the Renaissance passed into the modern period. When Baumer argues that "the modern origins of the history of ideas can be traced to the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century" (3), he is setting the stage for making the case that the manner of looking at the world from that period onward, quite as much as the specific content of ideas springing from that manner, shaped the pattern of Western ideas and the sensibilities that informed the way those ideas were treated. Indeed, the principal thesis of Baumer's Modern European Thought is that modernity as a category of intellectual in the realm of the history of ideas dates from the Enlightenment. That being so, Baumer's principal assumption appears to be that all subsequent modes and treatments of thought, however different from one another in their details, are adumbrations of modernist sensibility. The implications of such an assumption is that intellectual history is divided into premodern and modern modes and that the modernist attitude represents a significant, qualitative, and in many ways irrevocable break with the past...