The Romantic Current in the Social Sciences of England: Edward P. Thompson and Raymond Williams

Abstract

In a passage from the Grundrisse, Marx makes the following observations about the "romantic" perspective: It is as absurd to aspire to the return of an original plenitude as it is to believe that history is forever immobilized in the vacuum of the present. The bourgeois point of view has never advanced beyond this antithesis between itself and the romantic point of view, and thus the latter will accompany it, as its legitimate antithesis, to its happy ending.