Romanticism and Classicism: Deep Structures in Social Science

The “modern” only begins to manifest itself when, in answer to the question, What is distinctively human?, Romanticism replies not by referring to man's eternal capacity for reason and universal rationality, but, ‘instead, to his creative originality, to his individuated capacity to feel and to dream uniquely. The modern begins to emerge when man is seen, not merely as a creature that can discover the world, but also as one who can create new meanings and values, and can thus change himself and fundamentally transform his world, rather than unearth, recover, or “mirror” an essentially unchanging world order.