The Roots of Romanticism

Berlin rejects the treatment of Romanticism as primarily an aesthetic or literary phenomenon. For him, it was a philosophical revolution whose core was the elevation of the will—spontaneous, creative, unconstrained—above reason as the defining human capacity. This shift, which he traces from Kant's moral philosophy through Schiller and Fichte to the Jena Romantics, destroyed the Enlightenment's confidence in a single objective truth accessible to all rational beings. The most consequential result was not in poetry but in ethics and politics: once the will becomes sovereign, no external standard can adjudicate between competing human projects. Berlin's distinctive move is to insist that this revolution's effects were neither uniformly good nor bad, but genuinely unpredictable.

The book is not a written treatise but the transcript of six A. W. Mellon Lectures Berlin delivered at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in March and April 1965, under the title 'Some Sources of Romanticism' . The BBC recorded and later broadcast them. Hardy edited the transcripts for the 1999 first edition, published by Chatto & Windus in London and Princeton University Press . A second Princeton edition in 2013 added a foreword by John Gray, illustrations, a revised text, and an appendix containing Berlin's correspondence about the lectures and their reception . Readers should know they are encountering spoken lectures shaped for oral delivery, not a polished monograph.

A substantive critique concerns Berlin's characterization of the early German Romantics as irrationalist celebrants of the will. One reviewer notes that Berlin attributes to Friedrich Schlegel a claim about a 'terrible unsatisfied desire to soar into infinity,' whereas Schlegel's actual language concerns a longing for the infinite without the 'soaring' . More broadly, the reviewer argues, drawing on Manfred Frank's work on early German Romanticism, that figures like Schlegel were skeptics about the possibility of absolute knowledge—a position of humble acceptance of human finitude, not a rejection of reason . Berlin's dramatic contrast between Enlightenment rationality and Romantic voluntarism may therefore oversimplify the philosophical positions involved.

Berlin acknowledges the tension explicitly. Kant detested Romanticism and was a philosopher of science, so the paternal link cannot lie in his epistemology. Berlin locates it specifically in Kant's moral philosophy: the idea that the will is autonomous and that moral worth resides in the intention behind an act rather than in its consequences or conformity to external law. This primacy of the will, Berlin argues, captivated the Romantics even though Kant intended it to serve reason. Schiller and Fichte developed the doctrine further, and the Romantics then severed the will from its rational moorings entirely. Kant thus supplies the conceptual ingredient that the Romantics transformed into something he would have repudiated.

'Unbridled Romanticism' names the phase in which the will is released from any residual constraint—rational, moral, or social. Berlin associates this with figures like Fichte in his more nationalist register and with the Jena circle's celebration of creative genius. The danger is political: once the individual or collective will becomes the sole source of value, there is no principled limit to what it may demand. Berlin sees this logic feeding into twentieth-century nationalism and totalitarianism, where the 'authentic' will of a people or a leader justifies coercion. Yet he refuses a simple condemnation: the same Romantic impulse also underlies the modern respect for individual self-expression and cultural difference.

The Roots of Romanticism supplies the historical genealogy for the warning at the heart of 'Two Concepts of Liberty.' In that essay Berlin argues that positive liberty—self-mastery—can slide into coercion when a ruler claims to liberate a person's 'real' or rational self against their empirical desires. The lectures show where this idea came from: the Romantic elevation of the will as the authentic core of the person. Berlin's historical narrative makes the conceptual point concrete. At the same time, the lectures complicate any simple reading of Berlin as an anti-Romantic. He credits Romanticism with enriching the liberal understanding of human diversity and the inadequacy of any single rational blueprint for life.