The Selective Historical Memory of the West: German and Central European Idealism and Romanticism

INTRODUCTION

OBECTIVE IDEALISM, ROMANTICISM, AND CERTAIN CULTURAL STRANDS of the völkisch movement form coherent philosophical, artistic, and historical traditions deserve careful categorical treatment rather than retrospective pathologizing. They are not reducible to later political radicalizations, nor are they merely “dangerous,” “outdated,” or “fantastical.” Their depths lie in metaphysics, aesthetics, poetry, and a distinctive Central European understanding of culture, freedom, and community. This will help distinguish levels and historical connections without collapsing them, and attempt to diagnose the problem with the post-1945 order of the world, which I view as confused and delusional, because of its selective memory. The problem cascades into our imagination and creativity, and the relinquishing of these after they have been wrenched from us by the so-called disenchanted modern world.

Unlike many others today, I express a tinge of objective idealism, unapologetically, whereas it is largely considered dangerous and outdated, and fantastical to be so. I also adopt and retain elements of Romanticism and early elements and influences that inspired the völkisch movement. What comes with this, is the assumption that whatever was thought in an older age is automatically outdated, and that everyone living today ought to adopt the currently approved “modern” and “progressed” mode of thought, is itself a historical claim rather than a neutral fact. It is a form of progressive historicism: the belief that later stages of culture, science, or morality supersede earlier ones so thoroughly that the older forms become obsolete or illegitimate for living people. This view is widespread, but it is not realistic, and it is not obligatory.

People do continue to think and live according to older frameworks. My wife’s orientation toward the older pagan and Druidic ways of thinking that are just as much in line with her own Italian Spanish European ancestry, and my own retention of older modes of thought from my pull to them since I was a child, are not anomalies that modernity has somehow failed to erase. They are instances of the ordinary persistence of tradition, memory, and personal philosophical or spiritual orientation. Large numbers of people still inhabit religious, philosophical, folk, and pre-modern cosmologies, whether Christian, pagan, Idealistic, Romantic, or otherwise without waiting for permission from the current academic or cultural consensus. The claim that they “ought” to abandon those ways is a normative demand, not an empirical description of how human minds and cultures actually work.

PROGRESSIVE ASSUMPTIONS

However, this is the attitude I encountered from past colleagues in relation to my ideas and thinking, and several overlapping forces reinforce it. Firstly, the enlightenment confidence in linear progress: reason, science, and social improvement were expected to replace superstition, particularism, and “outdated” metaphysics. Secondly, methodological naturalism and positivism: only what fits current scientific or empirical canons is treated as serious knowledge. Older metaphysical, mythical, or hierarchical pictures of reality are reclassified as poetry, psychology, or error. Thirdly, post-1945 cultural norms in much of the West: after the disasters associated with certain 19ᵗʰ and 20ᵗʰ century European movements, many institutions adopted a strong bias against organic, hierarchical, national, or enchanted worldviews. Anything that smacks of “old Europe,” Romantic depth, or pre-modern sacred order is often treated as suspect by default. Lastly, the ideology of continuous updating: education, media, and professional life reward fluency in the latest approved frameworks and treat older ones as lagging or reactionary.

This same thinking itself works against our effort to recover the republican tradition.

None of this proves the older frameworks false. It shows that a particular historical coalition has succeeded in defining what counts as legitimate thought for institutional purposes.

THE PARADOX OF THE DISENCHANTED WORLD

Max Weber’s diagnosis of modernity as progressive “disenchantment” (Entzauberung) remains useful: the world is increasingly administered through calculable, impersonal, technical rationality. Sacred, mythical, and hierarchical orders lose public authority. Yet this process does not abolish the human need for meaning, form, or connection to older sources. It often intensifies the longing for them. The result is a paradox: a culture that officially declares itself disenchanted and progressive simultaneously polices or pathologizes those who continue to live by enchanted, traditional, or pre-modern orientations. What is discouraged is not merely “error,” but the continued existence of alternative ways of inhabiting the world.

Romanticism and Objective Idealism themselves pushed back against purely linear progressive narratives. They emphasized organic development, the presence of the infinite within the finite, the recurrence of forms, and the idea that culture and Spirit unfold through particular historical shapes rather than abolishing them. In that sense, retaining older modes of thought is not a failure to keep up. It can be a deliberate alignment with traditions that never accepted the progressive historicist premise in the first place, which has been our conversations once more as of late.

HISTORIOGRAPHY IS NEVER NEUTRAL

Hence, I advise to carefully question even the scholarly output or “consensus” thus far. It enabled me to write Occult Interests and Theosophy in Germany (1880s-1930s): Blavatsky vs. Hitler, List and Liebenfels on Race. Scholars generally treat Ariosophy as a symptom of the broader völkisch climate rather than a direct causal blueprint for National Socialism. This thinking hides biased rationale that demonizes all volkisch ideas, all Romanticism and Schools of Idealism.

The first truth and consistent obstacle the serious researcher must confront is that historiography is never neutral. Post-1945 scholarship on German Romanticism, Idealism, the völkisch movement, and their occult offshoots has often carried strong normative agendas. Treating Ariosophy primarily as a symptom of the broader völkisch milieu rather than a direct causal blueprint for Nazism was, in Goodrick-Clarke’s own framing, a moderating scholarly conclusion, e.g., he rejects the more sensational claims that List or Lanz supplied Hitler with a ready-made occult program. That formulation still sits inside a larger post-war pattern that pathologizes the entire constellation of German cultural nationalism, organicist thinking, and Romantic & Idealist currents as inherently proto-totalitarian or “dangerous.”

AGENDAS AND SELECTIVE FRAMING IN ACADEMIA

After 1945, explaining the Third Reich required accounting for its cultural and intellectual prehistory. One durable strategy has been to cast Romanticism, the German Idealists (Fichte, Schelling, the early Hegel in certain readings), Herder’s cultural nationalism, and the later völkisch current as a continuous slope toward racial mysticism and authoritarian politics. This has practical effects which we can all readily observe. Völkisch thought ranged from folklore collection, landscape mysticism, and anti-industrial cultural critique to explicit racial antisemitism and biological hierarchy. Collapsing the spectrum into a single “pathology” made it easier to treat any positive valuation of ethnic particularity, organic community, or pre-modern spiritual hierarchies as suspect.

The effect protected a preferred political teleology. The Liberal-internationalist, cosmopolitan, and progressive narratives after the war had strong incentives to present 19th-century German particularism and anti-Enlightenment currents as the main intellectual problem, rather than examining equally real continuities with modern bureaucratic rationalism, mass politics, or scientific racism that were not uniquely German. Their failure to diagnose but protect their emerging order will inevitably continue to come apart at the seams.

In this period, occult and esoteric materials became especially useful as “smoking guns.” Once Ariosophy was labeled an aggressively racist synthesis of Theosophy and “Aryan mythology,” the move easily extends backward: Theosophy’s root-race language, Blavatsky’s hierarchical cosmology, or any Indo-Europeanist language from the 19ᵗʰ century can be retrospectively contaminated by association. This contradiction is revealing, in that in the current order, an inversion has occurred. The swastika, a Eurasian symbol with history extending into 10,000 BCE is demonized and suppressed, while the flag and symbol of a colonial-settler project (Israel) brought about through financiers and political Zionism stands uncontested and triumphant.

GOODRICK-CLARK ON ARIOSOPHY AND THEOSOPHY

Goodrick-Clarke himself was more restrained than many popularizers of “Nazi occultism.” He documented the texts, networks, and ideas carefully and concludes that Ariosophy remained marginal and largely symptomatic. Yet the surrounding scholarly environment frequently treats the mere existence of völkisch-Romantic language as damning in itself. That is a value judgment dressed as historical method.

Mainstream academic treatment of Theosophy has long preferred the “constructed hodge-podge” framing over sustained engagement with its claimed Indo-Iranian, Tibetan, and related sources. It is a very redundant and lazy position at this point. David Reigle’s work and related primary-source investigations into the ideological content of the early Theosophical philosophical positions are still largely sidelined because they treat the possibility of genuine continuity with Eastern traditions as worth testing rather than dismissing a priori. The Tamil esotericist, Tallapragada Subba Row’s insistence that one must first master the range of ancient Aryan (Brahmanical) philosophy before comparing it with Tibetan Arhat doctrine is simply not the kind of claim most historians of Western esotericism are prepared to entertain on its own terms. The result is a circular procedure: Theosophy is declared non-serious because it is syncretic and hierarchical; therefore, any research that takes its Eastern self-understanding seriously is marginalized.

This is not pure “objectivity.” Methodological naturalism, discomfort with racial or hierarchical cosmologies, and the post-war allergy to anything that can be linked (however loosely) to later German nationalism all plays roles. The same scholarship that carefully distances Ariosophy from direct Nazi causation is often far less careful about protecting Romanticism, Idealism, or non-liberal cultural particularism from guilt by association.

None of the above requires rehabilitating Ariosophy’s actual content. List and Lanz produced explicitly racist, antisemitic, and eliminationist texts that fused selected Theosophical motifs with pan-German mythology. That is a historical fact independent of anyone’s post-war agenda. Theosophy’s own root-race scheme and occasional polemics against “Semitic” materialism and the general Adamic and Abrahamic-centered narratives that subordinate every other people’s traditions as inferior or false, but its self-understanding (and the Indian collaborators who shaped it) remained oriented toward a claimed archaic Indo-Iranian and Tibetan wisdom tradition, not toward Teutonic racial politics.

Romanticism and German Idealism are larger and more complex than their later political appropriations. Schelling’s nature philosophy, the early Romantics’ critique of mechanistic reason, or Herder’s cultural pluralism cannot be reduced to Lanz’s Ostara pamphlets without anachronism and selective reading. A historiography that systematically demonizes the entire tradition in order to inoculate against nationalism is doing ideology, not pure scholarship.

Critical reading must therefore require holding two things at once: (1) Ariosophy was a real, aggressive racist synthesis that borrowed from Theosophy and belonged to the radical end of the völkisch spectrum; (2) the broader academic habit of treating völkisch ideas, Romanticism, and Idealism as a single contaminated continuum frequently serves post-war political needs more than it illuminates the actual historical material. Primary texts, contemporaneous contexts, and the internal logic of the traditions themselves remain better guides than the moralized summaries that have dominated since 1945.

OBJECTIVE IDEALISM

“Spirit is the self of the actual consciousness … Spirit is concrete ethical actuality. The living ethical world is Spirit in its truth. Spirit, so far as it is the immediate truth, is the ethical life of a nation: the individual which is a world. (G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 1807)

Objective Idealism holds that reality is fundamentally spiritual or mental in character, yet this mind is not private or subjective. It is an objective, ordered, self-developing Absolute that manifests in nature, history, and human consciousness. Key figures include Schelling, especially the early identity philosophy and nature philosophy and Hegel’s Absolute Idealism. In my freshmen year of college, I read Hegel’s works in the library, and I have never put them down.

In objective idealism reality is the self-expression of the Absolute (or Idea, Spirit). Nature is not a dead mechanism but the externalization of Spirit (a similar theme is recovered in works on Presocratic philosophy); history is the progressive self-realization of freedom and reason. Knowledge is not a passive mirror of external objects but the Absolute coming to know itself through finite minds. Dialectic (Hegel) or the identity of subject and object (Schelling) replaces both empiricism and pure subjectivism. This differs sharply from Berkeleyan subjective Idealism (the world exists only as perception) and from materialism. It also differs from later transcendental Idealism in the more strictly Kantian sense.

These systems were systematic, rigorous, and continuous with earlier European metaphysics such Plato, Neoplatonism, Spinoza, and certain strands of Renaissance thought. They were never purely “German idiosyncrasy.” Their decline in academic prestige after the mid-20ᵗʰ century tracks the rise of positivism, analytic philosophy, and a post-war suspicion of totalizing metaphysical systems, especially German ones and which led to blanket accusations against Platonic philosophy. That cultural and institutional shift does not prove the systems false but registers a change in intellectual fashion and political climate.

THE ARTISTIC-POETIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL DEPTHS OF ROMANTICISM

The German Early Romanticism (roughly 1790s-1810s) of Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, Novalis, Hölderlin, the young Schelling, and circles around Jena represents the densest expression. Later Romanticism and related currents extended it across Central Europe. These currents have a connection to the republican tradition, that have been forgotten.

For Romanticism, we must consider firstly, its aesthetic and poetic core. Poetry and art are seen as higher modes of knowing than discursive reason. The fragment, irony, the arabesque, and the unfinished work express the infinite within the finite. Nature is a living organism and symbolic language, not a machine. The sublime, the uncanny, and the nocturnal open dimensions closed by Enlightenment clarity. The philosophical core contained a sustained critique of mechanistic science and abstract universalism with emphasis on organic form, individuality (Individualität), and the creative imagination (Einbildungskraft). Many Romantics absorbed Fichte’s emphasis on the productive ego and Schelling’s nature philosophy, then radicalized them into a vision of the world as artistic production of the Absolute. The cultural-political dimension defines the interest in folklore, medieval forms, national languages, and Volksgeist (the distinctive spirit of a people). This is not yet racial biology, but its cultural and historical particularity as the necessary medium of the universal.

Romanticism is continuous with aspects of the Renaissance in the recovery of classical and Neoplatonic sources, the dignity of creative imagination, and the poet as seer, while reacting against the more abstract rationalism of the later Enlightenment. Its influence runs through 19ᵗʰ century poetry, music through Schubert, Schumann, and Wagner in complex ways, landscape painting, and the idea of Bildung (formative self-cultivation).

“The seat of the soul is where the inner world and the outer world meet. Where they overlap, it is in every point of the overlap. Nature is an Æolian harp, a musical instrument whose tones are the re-echo of higher strings within us. The mysterious path goes inward. It is in us, and not anywhere else, where the eternity of the worlds, the past and the future are found. To romanticize the world is to make us aware of the magic, mystery and wonder of the world; it is to educate the senses to see the ordinary as extraordinary, the familiar as strange, the mundane as sacred, the finite as infinite. Poetry is the representation of the spirit—the world interior in its totality. The spirit of Poesy is the morning light, which makes the Statue of Memnon sound.” (Novalis, Blüthenstaub / Pollen and related Fragments, 1798; also see Novalis: Philosophical Writings, trans. Margaret Mahony Stoljar)

“Romantic poetry is a progressive universal poetry. Its destiny is not merely to reunite all of the different genres and to put poetry in touch with philosophy and rhetoric. Romantic poetry wants to and should combine and fuse poetry and prose, genius and criticism, art poetry and nature poetry. It should make poetry lively and sociable, and make life and society poetic. Romantic poetry alone is infinite, just as it alone is free and recognizes as its first law that the poetic will submits itself to no other law. The Romantic kind of poetry is the only one which is more than a kind—it is poetry itself. Only he who possesses a personal religion, an original view of infinity, can be an artist. Think of something finite molded into the infinite, and you think of man.” (Friedrich Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragments, Fragment 116, 1798)

VÖLKISCH CURRENTS: CULTURAL AND POLITICAL LAYERS

The völkisch movement of the late 19ᵗʰ and early 20ᵗʰ centuries is heterogeneous. It must be stratified. The reason for this is because there is a cultural-aesthetic layer that involves recovery of Germanic antiquity, runes, folklore, peasant life, landscape, and anti-industrial critique. Interest in organic community, rootedness, and the Volk as a living historical organism rather than a mere contractual aggregation of individuals. This layer overlaps with Romantic medievalism, the youth movement (Jugendbewegung), and certain artistic and literary circles; (II) There are philosophical and idealist influences, where some völkisch writers drew on Idealism’s emphasis on ethical life (Sittlichkeit), the ethical state, and the nation as a sphere of realized freedom. Others mixed these with more biological or racial theories. It is the later we reject; and (III) there is the radical political layer: Explicit racial hierarchies, antisemitism, and eliminationist programs, as in the most extreme Ariosophical texts. This layer is real and documented; it is not the whole of the cultural current.

Conflating the cultural-aesthetic and radical-political layers is a common post-war move. It erases the distinction between a Romantic or Idealist interest in organic form and national culture, on the one hand, and biological racism or authoritarian politics on the other.

Most völkisch writers mixed cultural, historical, and ethical language with varying degrees of racial thinking. This is the fact of its complexity. The movement expressed that earlier or more cultural-ethical pole from a more explicitly biological-racial pole. The notable figures in this history stressed spiritual-cultural regeneration of the Volk, national religion or ethical community, artistic and educational renewal, and the nation as an organic historical-ethical whole. Racial language appears, but it is secondary to cultural, religious, or Idealistic categories.

One thinker to consider is Paul de Lagarde (1827-1891), an orientalist and cultural critic whose Deutsche Schriften became a foundational text for the cultural-nationalist side of the völkisch current. He called for a specifically German national religion and ethical regeneration of the people. His well-known formulation of “Das Deutschtum liegt nicht im Geblüte, sondern im Gemüthe” (German-ness lies not in the blood, but in the mind-spirit explicitly prioritizes spiritual and cultural substance over pure biology. He drew on Idealist and Romantic sources for the idea of the nation as an ethical-historical community. He was strongly antisemitic and expansionist yet framed the issues primarily in cultural-religious and ethical terms rather than systematic racial biology.

Then, there was Julius Langbehn (1851-1907), who was author of the hugely influential Rembrandt als Erzieher (1890). He attacked modern science, urban civilization, and abstract intellectualism in favor of an organic, artistic, and educational renewal of the German spirit. The emphasis falls on Bildung, aesthetic form, and the living Volk as a cultural organism. Racial and antisemitic notes are present, but the core vision remains cultural-Romantic and Idealistic rather than biological-determinist. He is routinely grouped with Lagarde as a prophet of cultural despair and national regeneration.

These two, sometimes discussed alongside later figures such as Arthur Moeller van den Bruck in analyses of cultural pessimism, represent the strand that most clearly reflects Idealism’s language of ethical life, the ethical state, and the nation as the concrete realization of freedom and spirit.

As I discussed in German Aryanism and the Magical Blood of the Teuton: Gobineau, Chamberlain, Guido von List and Liebenfels, these figures integrated or subordinated cultural and Idealistic motifs to explicit racial hierarchy, anthropology, breeding, or occult-racial mythology and are the front for the main view about the völkisch movement.

Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927) produced The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899). It is the classic synthesis, that combined cultural history and Idealist-sounding claims about the creative force of the “Teutonic” or Aryan spirit with a systematic racial theory of history in which the Germanic peoples stand at the summit and the Jews appear as a destructive counter-force. The work supplied a scholarly-sounding racial framework that many later völkisch and National Socialist writers drew upon.

Guido von List (1848-1919) was the founder of Armanism, which was later absorbed into Ariosophy. He fused Germanic mythology, runic occultism, distorted Theosophical root-race ideas, and evinced a hierarchical racial cosmology. The ancient Aryan-Germanic priesthood and pure racial stock become the bearers of esoteric wisdom; and racial decline and “non-Aryan” influence was his explanation for modern degeneration. This reasoning does not constitute as a viable diagnosis.

Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels (1874-1954) coined the term “Ariosophy.” His Theozoology and the magazine Ostara advanced extreme biological-racial theories with Teutonic Aryans viewed as “god-men,” lower races as the result of bestial interbreeding, calls for racial breeding programs, sterilization, while promoting the exclusion or elimination of “inferior” elements. Occult and Theosophical motifs are present and disfigured, but the framework is explicitly biological and eliminationist.

Other names in the more biological-racial line include Ludwig Woltmann (racial anthropology and Social-Darwinist historiography), Theodor Fritsch (organizational antisemitism with racial grounding), and later popularizers such as Hans F.K. Günther (racial typology) and Richard Walther Darré (Blut und Boden).

Lagarde and Langbehn exemplify the cultural-ethical pole that most directly appropriated Idealism’s language of Sittlichkeit, the ethical community, and the nation as a sphere of realized historical freedom and spirit. Chamberlain, List, and Lanz represent the pole that mixed or subordinated those motifs to biological race theory, racial hierarchy, and (in the Ariosophical cases) occult racial mythology. Almost no major völkisch writer was free of racial language by the early 20ᵗʰ century, but the relative weighting of ethical-cultural Idealism versus biological determinism is a recognized and useful distinction for the development of this scholarship.

RENAISSANCE, CENTRAL EUROPEAN IDEALS AND REPUBLICAN TRADITIONS

During the Renaissance periods, German and Central European reception of Renaissance humanism, Neoplatonism, and hermetic thought from figures such as Reuchlin, Agrippa, and later Winckelmann’s classical ideal fed into both Idealism and Romanticism. The Renaissance recovery of antiquity as a living model of form and virtù reappears in the Romantic and Idealist insistence that culture is formative rather than merely decorative. These currents are not isolated late inventions.

Within Central European ideals, the notion of a cultural Mitteleuropa, the ethical state, Bildung as the cultivation of inwardness and public spirit, and the nation as an ethical-historical community rather than a pure contractual or ethnic-biological unit. These ideas draw on Idealism’s concept of Sittlichkeit and Romantic organicism.

In the republican and freedom traditions of that period, the young Fichte was a republican enthusiast of the French Revolution who sought a German path to freedom grounded in culture and education rather than pure abstract rights or Jacobin terror. Hegel’s mature political philosophy was constitutional and recognized civil society, the rule of law, and mediated freedom within institutions. Many Romantics criticized absolutism and mechanistic statecraft while seeking forms of community that preserved individuality and historical depth, and the republican strand is present, though it is a cultural and ethical republicanism rather than pure liberal individualism or later mass democracy. This cultural and ethical republicanism is important for recovery in every age.

WHY THESE TRADITIONS ARE TREATED AS SUSPECT IN INTELLECTUAL CULTURE

Post-1945 intellectual culture, especially in the West, has strong incentives to treat metaphysical Idealism, Romantic organicism, and any positive valuation of national or cultural particularity as continuous with authoritarianism. Methodological naturalism dismisses objective Idealism as speculative. Cosmopolitan liberalism tends to read Volksgeist or organic community as exclusionary by definition. The result is a selective historical memory that over-emphasizes radical political endpoints and under-emphasizes the philosophical, artistic, and republican resources within the same traditions.

A careful approach keeps the categories distinct with Objective Idealism as a metaphysical claim about the structure of reality; Romanticism as an aesthetic and epistemological revolution; cultural völkisch interests as one late expression of organic and historical thinking; and radical racial-political programs as a specific, contingent radicalization. The first three retain independent intellectual and artistic substance. They can be studied, criticized, and selectively appropriated without either uncritical nostalgia or reflexive demonization. Their connection to German and Central European ideals of Bildung, ethical community, and cultural form is historical fact, not an anachronistic projection.

No one is required to adopt the currently dominant intellectual fashion as their personal metaphysics or spiritual orientation. Couples and individuals who think in older ways whether pagan, Idealistic, Romantic, traditional Christian, or otherwise may continue to do so. Although, the institutional discouragement is real, it does not dictate the inner life or the private cultural inheritance people choose to maintain. The depths of those older currents (philosophical, artistic, poetic, and ancestral) remain available for those who find them living rather than obsolete.

THE COST OF THE WEST’S SELECTIVE MEMORY AND STRUCTURAL WEAKNESSES OF LIBERALISM

The selective pathologization of Romantic, Idealistic, and related cultural-national currents has real costs for European and Western imaginative life. When large stretches of a civilization’s philosophical, poetic, and political inheritance are treated primarily as contaminated precursors rather than as complex resources, expression becomes cautious, self-censored, and thinner. Creativity and imagination suffer when the ideals of organic form, ethical community, historical particularity, non-contractual freedom, and the nation as a sphere of realized ethical life (Sittlichkeit) are placed under permanent suspicion. That is a cultural loss, independent of anyone’s political preferences.

The history of racism and of the radical racial-political endpoints does not automatically justify this scale of erasure. Racism, biological hierarchy, and eliminationist programs, including those associated with Chamberlain’s more racial synthesis, List’s Armanism, Lanz’s Ariosophy, and their later political descendants are documented historical realities that must be faced without euphemism. They do not, however, exhaust the content of German Idealism, Early Romanticism, the cultural-ethical strands of the völkisch milieu, or the broader European republican and constitutional traditions that intersected with them. Treating the entire matrix as a single contaminated continuum is little more than a form of selective memory.

Progressive historicism reinforces the problem. Once progressive historicism became the default assumption, then any serious recovery of pre-1945 philosophical or republican resources can be relegated to the category of outdated or dangerous thought by association. Ideas of civic virtue, ethical life realized in institutions, the nation as a concrete community of freedom rather than a pure contractual aggregate, or the formative power of culture and Bildung remain highly pertinent to the structural problems of the post-1945 order with mass democracy’s tendency toward atomization, the weakness of intermediate institutions, the tension between universal norms and particular historical communities, the administrative state’s pressure on organic forms of life. Declaring those resources obsolete does not make the problems disappear; it simply leaves fewer conceptual tools with which to address them, and we are living with those consequences in this timeline. This is evident the more one reads the history of the republican recoveries.

Because public imagination has difficulty demarcating the cultural-ethical Idealistic and Romantic registers from the biological-racial ones, the field is left partly occupied by those who flatten everything into race and blood. Careful categorical work, like the kind that distinguishes Lagarde’s and Langbehn’s cultural-ethical emphasis from List’s and Lanz’s racial-occult systems, or Hegelian Sittlichkeit from Ariosophical hierarchy is precisely what has been discouraged. The result is a narrowed range of legitimate European self-expression and a corresponding loss of imaginative and philosophical depth.

None of this requires rehabilitating eliminationist politics or denying the reality of racial ideologies and their consequences. It requires refusing the further step of treating the larger civilizational inheritance as permanently radioactive. Creativity and serious thought depend on the ability to engage primary sources, historical distinctions, and living traditions without obligatory self-suppression. When that ability is constrained by selective memory, the West’s own expressive and philosophical resources are diminished, while the more radical and reductive appropriations continue to find space in the resulting vacuum.

This is a recurring structural weakness in liberalism in its more expansive modern and cultural forms, its attempt to totalize, and its attempt to control and constrain narrative.

Classical liberalism, at its best, was a theory of limited government, individual rights, rule of law, and institutional restraints on power. It aimed to create space for competing ways of life rather than to impose a comprehensive vision of the good. In practice, however, liberalism has repeatedly generated totalizing tendencies: the expansion of its anthropological assumptions (the autonomous, rights-bearing individual as the primary unit), its progressive historicist narrative (later stages supersede earlier ones), and its claim to neutrality that in fact privileges certain forms of reason, identity, and historical memory while treating others as residual or suspect. Now, no classical liberal can go unscathed in critiquing the modern distinctions.

When those tendencies intensify, liberalism shifts from protecting pluralism to managing and constraining it. Traditions that emphasize organic community, ethical life realized in particular historical forms (Sittlichkeit), national or cultural particularity, metaphysical Idealism, or pre-modern cosmologies are reclassified as threats to the progressive order. The result is not open contestation but selective pathologization, institutional discouragement, and a narrowing of the range of legitimate expression and inquiry.

Distinctions that do indeed matter, between cultural-ethical Idealism and biological racialism, between Romantic organicism and eliminationist politics, between republican civic virtue and modern ethno-nationalism become harder to maintain in public imagination precisely because the dominant framework treats large parts of the European inheritance as contaminated by default.

This is a form of control. It presents itself as anti-totalitarian and protective, yet it operates by narrowing the field of what may be seriously recovered, developed, or imaginatively inhabited. The history of racism and authoritarian politics supplies real reasons for caution, but it does not justify the further step of muting entire philosophical, artistic, and political registers. When liberalism attempts to totalize its own premises in this way, it undercuts one of its original strengths: the capacity to leave space for deep, non-liberal, or pre-liberal sources of meaning and form. The creative and intellectual costs follow directly from that attempt at constraint.

The capacity to dream, to imagine, and to create is not a luxury or a private pastime. It is the living expression of the soul’s encounter with the infinite within the finite, which is exactly what the Romantic and Idealist currents understood as the highest task of the human spirit. We want people to dream and imagine and create once more. The fragments of Novalis, the progressive universal poetry of Schlegel, Schelling’s identity of nature and spirit, Hölderlin’s longing for oneness with the living whole, Hegel’s ethical world as Spirit in its truth remain available. Let us not constrain but restore to order the content of the soul for the contentment of the soul, and create and give birth to successive renaissances once more.

“To be one with everything that lives, to return in blissful self-oblivion into the all of nature, that is the summit of thoughts and joys, that is the holy mountain pinnacle, the place of eternal peace. O blissful nature! I can’t tell what comes over me when I lift up my eyes before your beauty, but all the joy of heaven is in the tears I weep before you. Often, lost in the immensity of blue, I look up into the aether and out into the hallowed sea, and it’s as if a kindred spirit opened its arms to me, as if the pain of isolation were dissolved in the life of the godhead. O Seele! jezt schon bist du so wundervoll! Wer denkt dich aus? … O Seele schon jezt bist du so groß, so himmlisch, wann du von Erdentand und Menschendruk entlediget in großen Momenten zu deinem Urstof empor dich schwingst.” (Friedrich Hölderlin, Hyperion, or the Hermit in Greece, 1797-1799)