In the liberal bourgeois world, the detached, isolated, and emancipated individual becomes the middle point, the court of last resort, the absolute.
Naturally the illusion of being God could be maintained only in pantheistic or panentheistic sentiments. In psychological reality, therefore, it combined with other, less subjectivistic affects. The subject always claimed, however, that his experience was the only thing of interest.
This claim can be realized only in a bourgeois order based on rules. Otherwise the "external conditions" for the undisturbed occupation with one's own mood are not satisfied. Psychologically and historically, romanticism is a product of bourgeois security.
One could fail to recognize this only as long as one committed the error of considering as romanticism itself things that happen to be favorite romantic objects, such as chivalry and the Middle Ages - in other words, sundry themes and occasions of the romantic interest. A robber knight can be a romantic figure, but he is not a romantic. The Middle Ages is a powerfully romanticised complex, but it is not romantic.
[Carl Schmitt]
Political Romanticism, p. 99
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[Carl Schmitt]
Political Romanticism, p. 99
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