Ideas of the Enlightenment & Romanticism

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 da

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regard, Baumer cites the emergence of ideas of liberty and equality on one hand, and aspects of thought that became "touchstones for testing [i.e., challenging] political and social institutions" (Baumer 219). This implies a belief in progress, based on the application of reason to the prevailing situation, with a view toward improving it and an understanding of it (Baumer 245). When one puts together this range of views, it appears that the 1789 French Revolution was the logical outgrowth of the Enlightenment in Europe. Baumer cites Bentham's utilitarianism and attack on natural law in answer to revolution, but both strands of thought are associated with the Enlightenment to the degree they rely on reason and to the degree they both address the communitarian and social implications of the application of human reason to the human condition. Indeed, Hume, who "explicitly rejected the philosophy of natural law" (Baumer 223), was sympathetic to the cause of revolution in both America and Europe. The difference between the Enlightenment's concept of natural law and the utilitarian concept (also in Enlightenment tradition) that legitimacy of such law is inflected by its practical (moral) application in sociopolitical life appears to ha
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Approximate Word count = 6744
Approximate Pages = 27 (250 words per page)

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