‘Romantic worldview as a narcissistic construct’

Abstract

The view that human intellectual life and values are predetermined by one’s membership of a collective such as culture, ethnicity, class or linguistic community has been the core of the Romantic intellectual tradition from German eighteenth-century romantics to late twentieth-century postmodernist social constructivists. The view fundamentally depends on the acceptance of a number of paradoxes and theoretical positions that are philosophically difficult to defend; its widespread popularity can only indicate an extra-theoretical motivation to accept it. In this paper I argue that modern psychological research about narcissism provides a comprehensive explanation for this motivation. While the results of the analysis could be applied to any segment of the Romantic tradition, this paper mainly concentrates on German art historiography of the era between Bismarck and Adenauer.

Keywords

• Romanticism
• narcissism
• psychohistory
• appropriation of the Renaissance
• self-esteem regulation in art history