Title: Romanticism and nature – Environmental History Resources
Headings: Romanticism and nature
Romanticism and nature
Further reading

Content: Romanticism and nature – Environmental History Resources
Romanticism and nature
August 1, 2015 / K. Jan Oosthoek / Comments Off
on Romanticism and nature
Romanticism was an intellectual and artistic movement that originated in the second half of the 18 th century. It was a reactionary response against the scientific rationalisation of nature during the Enlightenment, commonly expressed in literature, music, painting and drama. But it was not simply a response to the rationalism of the Enlightenment but also a reaction against the material changes in society, which accompanied the emerging and expanding industrial capitalism in the late eighteenth century. In this transition production became centralised in the city. The factory system of mass production was centred on processes that used and controlled natural forces such as water and wind, but also increased power by increasingly using fossil fuels. These processes, combined with the profit motive, “degraded and despoiled”, as some romantics saw it, the environment (although they would not have used the term). Cities expanded to unprecedented sizes, and grew into into centres of pollution, poverty and deprivation. They began to symbolise the failure of laissez faire liberalism’s philosophy that permitting people to follow their self-interest would lead to a perfect society. Population movement from the land, and rational search for economically efficient production methods (involving division of labour, timekeeping and mechanisation) led, according to the Romantic Movement, to spiritual alienation of the masses from the land and nature. As Marx and Engels perceived it, they became units of production: