The Early German Romantics elaborated a highly original philosophical-political framework where subjectivity is not construed as essentially the property of an isolated individual having control over other people and over nature. Rather, each subject can exist and flourish only within a web of harmonious relations of mutual dependency which connects it with history, with other people, and with the natural world. The implications of such a conception for our notion of individual and collective autonomy and for political life are radical. This book explains and analyses this novel way of thinking, places it in its historical context, and brings out some of the major consequences it has for our social life, and in particular for a number of issues of special contemporary relevance such as gender and ecology.
This book focuses on one of the central ideas of German Romanticism: that the self is not, as many previous philosophers thought, an isolated individual who is also the sovereign master over nature, but rather is inherently embedded in history and politics, and dependent on nature.
