Romantic Enlightenment

Romantic Enlightenment

A reoccurring theme in studying American history is finding out exactly what were the founding fathers thinking and how their philosophies changed along with society’s as times changed. Henry Commager wrote in his essay, “… it was Americans who not only embraced the body of Enlightenment principles, but wrote them into law, crystallized them into institutions, and put them to work. That, as much as the winning of independence and the creation of the nation, was the American Revolution” (Lerner). Commager’s essay pursues its thesis relentlessly as it explored the ideas both of American and of European philosophies during the age of Enlightenment and that of international community of intellectuals: educators, revolutionaries, rationalists, Deists, men of letters, statesmen, and citizens of the world, who sought useful truths in reasoning. The underlying principle on which they all agreed was the foundation of their perceptions of human nature, God, and society, was order. They were occupied with organization, classification, codification, and systematization (Lerner). During the early American Republic Era of Enlightenment gave way into the Romantic Era. The heart of reasoning in American philosophy that led to personal and religious freedom through unity of a nation gave way to Romanticism, the individual and its rebellion against the confinement of religious tradition, perception of nature, and society. Although the two philosophies, Enlightenment and Romanticism, were different in principles, one could not exist without the other.

In the mid-eighteenth century Philadelphia was the capital of the American Enlightenment, it was intellectual and cultural center of the American colonies presided over by B...

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...d is more complicated than to say we should only reason and use common sense. As the philosophical theories of the Enlightenment began to decline, the only other possible reaction is for Romanticism to rise. As Nathaniel Hawthorne probably would of have suggested through his short stories, although our founding fathers found our country based on being rational and use of deductive reasoning, they must of had faith that everything would work out for the best.

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Lerner, Saul. "The Empire of Reason." Magill’s Literary Annual 1978 (1978): 1-3. MagillOnLiterature Plus. EBSCO. Web. 27 Sept. 2011.