In our Introduction we briefy discuss Collingwood’s life and philosophical career, as well as mentioning his work in other fields such as history and archaeology. We argue for the continued relevance of Collingwood’s thought for both twenty-first-century academic philosophy and for some of the central concerns of contemporary life beyond academia, such as scientism, the idolatry of technology, and the current political climate. The second part of the Introduction gives an overview of the fourteen chapters in the volume.

At the other end of the philosophical spectrum from Saint-Simonian ‘materialism’, though sharing its rhetoric of progress, was Hegelian Idealism. It influenced not only critics such as Franz Brendel and A. B. Marx, but also the ‘New German School’ of Liszt and Wagner. Though Hegel opposed Romanticism, applications of his aesthetics to music by Marx and Liszt remained closer to it, noting the convergence of music and literature on Romantic subjectivity and responding with the new genre of ‘programme music’. Another Romantic project, the ‘new mythology’, was realized in Wagner’s operatic Gesamtkunstwerk. Its more ‘realist’ approach to feeling was derived from Feuerbach’s post-Hegelian philosophy and little changed by Wagner’s later enthusiasm for Schopenhauer. Though overshadowed by his universalizing and exclusionary goal of a ‘purely human’ art (one that had no space for Jewish artists), Wagner’s aesthetic technique remained faithful to the idea of theatrical illusion inaugurated a century earlier by Rousseau and Diderot.

The Introduction critiques the dominant critical-musicological picture of Romanticism as a nineteenth-century aesthetic paradigm emphasizing artistic autonomy and escape from the social, and posits an alternative. Romantic ideas of sociality in art and music differed from modern materialist accounts in highlighting the mediatory role of emotion or feeling alongside further ‘ideal’ or imaginative factors in listeners’ experience. Such ideas converge with recent contributions in sociology, music studies, anthropology and philosophy which frame affect in social, holistic terms as atmosphere, Stimmung (mood or “attunement”) and correspondence. These are summarized in the term ‘affective relationality’. In both musicology after Carl Dahlhaus and the recent history of emotions, a watershed c.1800 has separated the Romantic paradigm from its eighteenth-century predecessors, instead of paying attention to the continuity between eighteenth-century sentimentality and Romanticism. This ‘sentimental-Romantic’ continuum is exemplified by Mme de Staël, whose writings’ resonances with the book’s chapters are explored.

Modern objections to Romantic music criticism often take aim at its hieratic posture, as if it were committed to the absolute metaphysical ‘truth content’ of the works it paraphrased. In fact the Idealist philosophical basis of sentimental-Romantic critical practice was a much more subjective interrelationship between feeling and reflection. As theorized by Herder, this formed the basis of Bildung, the originally anthropological idea of ‘cultivation’ later fetishized by the German middle classes. Through Kant and Schiller it tied into notions of ‘character’ and poetic ‘characterisation’, developed during the 1790s and soon a firm part of Romantic music criticism. Romantic poetic imagery could be pressed into the service of religious dogma, as it was by Joseph d’Ortigue writing on Beethoven’s instrumental music. But other forms of Romantic criticism after Herder used ‘characterisation’ instead as an empathetic path to understanding the diversity of musical cultures, an approach exemplified by Joseph Mainzer.

Liberalism is at the heart of modern ‘Western’ history, politics, and international relations. Central to understandings of liberty, freedom, democracy, rights and the rule of law, liberalism has animated debates on abolition and empire, war and peace. This chapter provides an account of liberalism as a contested phenomena that originated at least in the eighteenth century and has had profound international political consequences ever since. To tell this story, the chapter begins by considering how to make sense of the contestations surrounding liberalism, before examining how and why liberalism matters to International Relations at key moments of its development as a discipline: in the age of empires, the inter-war years, during the Cold War and ‘new’ world which ensued, and now in this epoch of endless war.

This chapter examines the rise and growth of human rights. First, it discusses the historical development of human rights. Second, it outlines how human rights are understood today. Third, it explains how the liberal universalism that lies behind human rights has come up against cultural resistance. Finally, the chapter touches on some challenges that lie ahead in the struggle for human rights.

After addressing Germaine de Stäel’s ‘invention’ of European Romanticism in On Literature and On Germany, the introductory chapter explains the editorial choices behind the collection, including its expansive time frame, European focus, and comparative method. It then surveys Lord Byron’s continental reception to demonstrate the utility of a pan-European approach. Although extremely familiar, the case of Byron and of Byronism is of central importance to the history of European Romanticism because of the European role that it gave to British literature, but also because it brings to the fore some common problems raised when using Romanticism as a critical category. The next section looks at how literary historians have addressed these problems, then discusses some of the period’s most salient features. The final part provides a chapter by chapter synopsis in order to help readers navigate the volume.

The section’s final chapter examines the relation between philosophy, poetry, and criticism, revisiting a number of concepts introduced in previous chapters, including the development of a historical imagination and of organicist ideas of nature and culture, the new interest in aesthetics as a moral source, and the rise of sensibility as a challenge to disembodied reason. All of these contributed to a sense of crisis inherent to Enlightenment itself. It first reads the English poets Thomas Gray and Edward Young, traditionally seen as precursors of European Romanticism, alongside Kant’s First Critique to show how the philosopher sought to save reason from Hume’s scepticism by making it the product of a shared knowledge based on nature rather than book learning. the chapter then explains how the notion of ideas as historically and linguistically mediated emerged out of Vico, Rousseau, and Kant, giving particular attention to the Genevan philosopher’s social thought. The last part examines the Kant-Herder controversy, which brought to a crisis key tensions in late-Enlightenment culture between critical reason and a direct, lyrical insight into natural causality. The latter was dismissed by Kant as a dangerous form of ‘genius-cultism’ that lent itself to revolutionary fanaticism.

The primary goal of Chapter 3 is to introduce some of the important themes that have come up when philosophers think about the (human) mind, where it comes from and how it relates to the body and to the surrounding world. To this end, we visit a division of philosophy called the philosophy of mind, which will involve a review of a variety of “-isms” (such as rationalism, empiricism, mind–body dualism, monism, materialism, idealism, behaviorism, physicalism, associationism, and so on). We also meet a number of important philosophers who have developed various and often opposing views on the nature–nurture issue. We conclude with a discussion of what philosophers of mind call “the hard problem,” how to explain the notion of consciousness.

The two great Victorian Platonists – George Grote and Benjamin Jowett – are often perceived as championing diametrically opposed perspectives on Plato: utilitarian vs. idealist. This chapter argues that no less important is what they had in common: an ‘atomist’ hermeneutics, in fierce reaction against attempts to make a system out of the dialogues; and a combination of scrupulous attention to the texts as historical documents with insistence that giving Plato his place in the history of philosophy and ‘in the scale of human improvement’ was no less the historian’s obligation. Finally, both men were active in the public sphere, looking for similar ‘modern applications’ of what was best in Plato’s political thought, particularly in the sphere of education.

The Conclusion locates Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant among contemporary Anglophone interpretations. The author shows that Heidegger’s interpretation is legible within the broader landscape of Anglophone Kant scholarship by charting its position on Kant’s metaphysics, discursivity, conceptualism, idealism, and historicism. It is concluded that Heidegger offers us a live option for interpreting Kant.

What can a model of continence based in male physiology have to offer female writers? This chapter argues that the strong opinions that Vernon Lee expressed about sex and its relation to art in her early writing should not be dismissed as the result of repression or parental indoctrination, as they have been by previous critics. Lee, like Johnson, combined Paterian sensuous continence with other nineteenth-century discourses, particularly discussions of sexual health by New Women writers, and the result is central to her theorizing about life, social ethics, and art. She insisted on the harmfulness of sex to both individuals and society, and that those who felt otherwise were suffering from ‘logical misconception’. But Lee was also an aesthete, for whom sensuous experience was extremely important. She worried that continent aestheticism would limit an aesthete’s experience and lead to solipsism and waste. Her answer was a Paterian disciplined love, a reaching out to what is unhealthy and corrupt, whether people, places, or artworks, and learning to filter the good from the bad, to ‘cleanse and recreate it in the fire of intellectual and almost abstract passion’.

Derek Offord surveys the clashing ideological movements building towards cataclysm in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century: the revolutionary currents (idealisms, socialisms, populisms, terrorisms) that flourished in the years leading up to the assassination of Alexander II in 1881, and the reactionary elements of conservative nationalism that gained ground under Alexander III. Offord considers Chekhov’s non-ideological but politically charged writing within this context.

Gary Saul Morson provides an overview of the ideological ferment of the Russian intelligentsia, the quasi-religious devotion that Russian progressives brought to new dogmas of nihilism, populism, atheism, and scientism, while emphasizing Chekhov’s status as the most steadfast of major Russian writers in his rejection of the ideological fanaticisms of his contemporaries among the intelligentsia.