The Romantic poets, writers, and philosophers of Western Europe — borne out of the mechanizing cauldron of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries — were among the first critics of bourgeois modernity, the civilization created by the triumph of capitalism. Romanticism — a “cultural movement” cutting across literature, philosophy, the arts, politics, religion, and history — was characterized by nostalgia for a real or imagined past, and was constituted by both conservative and revolutionary currents and thinkers.

Romanticism took as its shared basis, Brazilian-French sociologist Michael Löwy notes, the fundamental critique of “the quantification of life, i.e. the total domination of (quantitative) exchange value, of the cold calculation of price and profit, and of the laws of the market, over the whole social fabric.”

With the quantification of life in bourgeois civilization came the “decline of all qualitative values — social, religious, ethical, cultural or aesthetic ones — the dissolution of all qualitative human bonds, the death of imagination and romance, the dull uniformization of life, the purely ‘utilitarian’ — i.e. quantitatively calculable — relation of human beings to one another, and to nature.”