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In the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, conservative philosophy in Germany discovered the dynasty as a tool for criticizing both Enlightenment philosophy and more progressive forms of Romantic thought. Where their French analogues had charged Enlightenment philosophy with corroding the family—a claim that would have been hard to substantiate vis-à-vis German romanticism—the German reaction instead insisted that their contemporaries had corroded the dynastic dimension of the family. This chapter traces the idea that modernity entailed a truncation of the family, that it deprived it of its distant branches, extending into the distant past and the far future. It deals with the work of Johann August Freiherr von Starck and other anti-revolutionary philosophers in the German-speaking world, and then shows how their understanding of the truncation of the family transmitted itself to philosophers like Franz von Baader, early sociologists like Heinrich Riehl, and authors like Adalbert Stifter.

According to a general belief, it is a fundamental trait of modern philosophy to have articulated itself as a thinking grounded in the certitude of self-consciousness. Pioneered and launched by Descartes, this thinking is said to have climbed to its height with Kant and, more so, in Fichte’s philosophy. Romanticism has also been interpreted as part of this movement. However, since Dieter Henrich and his students published their investigations of previously unknown philosophical sources, it has become clear that these earlier interpretations are not entirely accurate. This chapter considers the constellation of early romantic philosophy, i.e., what was left out of Henrich’s research; or rather, it summarizes the results of Manfred Frank’s work over the last twenty-five years.

The introduction serves to contextualize the question underlying the edited volume, namely: what are the reasons behind the recent rise of interest in philosophical romanticism? To do this, the introduction highlights key themes of romantic thought, distinguishes the meaning and significance of the term “romanticism” and how it is understood in the volume, and remarks on the (apparently sudden) rise of interest in philosophical romanticism. It argues that the recent interest in philosophical romanticism—by philosophers from a number of different fields (social and political philosophy, hermeneutics, philosophy of science, aesthetics)—is both unprecedented in size and unique in focus, in that it is specifically concerned with the philosophical aims and methods of romanticism. It then offers synopses of each of the chapters in the volume, emphasizing how the individual contributions seek to answer the question regarding the relevance of romanticism.