关键词: 浪漫主义; 观念史; 整体批评观; 政治哲学

Abstract: Having always been used in many senses, the history of the concept“Romanticism” has a kind of complicated relationship to modernity, rationality, secularization and various philosophical assumptions concerning with them, and to the aesthetic taste, the criteria of judgment, and cultural milieu as well, in the context of grand theories in the turn of 18th and 19th centuries. Then, the history of concepts within the complex connections with history of intellectual, critical, political ideas has become the object of interdisciplinary studies. However, we could discern three strains in the narrative tradition. Firstly, according to the historians, as one of the most intractable and unconstricted concepts,“Romanticism”may, properly speaking, be a dangerous heterogeneity, which is possibly the roots of historical disasters. Secondly, from the perspectives of literary criticism and compared with classicism, it seems to us that there have been, among Romantics in diversity, some common opinions about poetry, poetic imagination and its characteristics, the relations of man and universe, with the convergent orientations in poetic modes and its rhetorics. Finally, in the history of political thoughts, it may be asserted that the essence of Romanticism consists of a certain political decisionism, laying claim that every individual has its own right to actualize the noble will to freedom, self-assertion, self-determination of its destiny, and choice of its future.

Keywords: Romanticism; history of ideas; holistic criticism; political philosophy