Bertrand Russell on the Romantic Movement 

If you have some knowledge about art history it shouldn't be that hard to conclude painters weren't peasants. Painters still had patrons, art was still an exclusive thing for the higher classes and the revolt of the poor is even today a rare occasion (strikers today still are lower middle-class while the poor either live on the street or work 24/7 just to make ends meet). A great deal of hippie musicians had rich parents and chose to revolt in a similar fashion like the romantics did against these conventions of society, however they used their parents' money to accomplish these goals. The first real rebel in my eyes has to be either Goya or Manet, true Romantic heroes that used their skills not for simple pleasure but actually a desire to change the world.

It is absolutely everything to do with Socialism, if you understand the dictatorship of Napoléon I and III you know absolutely everything you need to know about the 20th century dictators as far as policies and apparatus of the state, just different forms of social Darwinism added on. The socialists were the biggest enemy of the workers, who do you think all those tens of millions of people they killed were? who did they take the right to vote from, that had only just been introduced after WWI. Both Fascism, Communism and the Nazi's. The only genuine workers movement was hijacked or accused of being 'Utopian'. The original 'Social Democrats' were genuine workers parties before they got jumped over by opportunists and 'Democratic Socialists' and 'Revisionists'. If you find the opinions of workers, as rare as those opinions are because the European intellectuals were the Land Lords and they wrote and published they're own opinions, genuine workers saw Communists and Fascists a like, the main enemy. What we take for granted today as being 'Liberal Democracy' was created by workers movements of the 19th and early 20th century who fought for workers rights, equal universalism, child labour laws, better wages and working conditions, universal rights with universal accountability and universal suffrage. None of these things existed before the 1890's. The socialism everyone remembers today is pre-Liberal, Pre-Democratic, pre-industrial German and Russian aristocrats who all coalesced around Napoléon III in France 1848 and all justified his dictatorship, except for a few Anarchists. This is the period that 'Socialism' becomes associated with te 'Left-Wing' also, this is the point where what we now call Communism and Fascism [Theory] moves into two separate ideologies coming from the same place and time. The Social Democrats, genuine workers, where pretty much Lockean classical Liberals who wanted the Social contract to apply to everyone equally and wanted certain forms of protectionism like Social security and unemployment benefits. Not that radical sounding today but were very radical at the time and took a lot of organizing and struggle to get these gains.

Although Bertie himself was as aristocratic as they come .? To be fair : it never appeared to cloud his judgement . How we need incisive intellects like his today !! ( though, I have no doubt he'd be No Platformed by most of our leading universities - he didn't do ' box ticking ' or ' victimhood " studies..

Yes, William Morris was opposed to machine production, which would put his stuff out of most people’s reach.

So, to Russell, to be romantic is to be a damn fool. Russell was brilliant, obviously, but I don't buy a lot of this. He cuts corners and gets much wrong here (too tedious to list). I. Berlin is quirky re romanticism (German-centered) but is much better.

He was recognized and passed out of fashion when Wittgenstein overtook him. What his analytical philosophy explored - based on mathematics and logic - was clearly eclipsed. However, his popularizations are fantastic, as this chapter demonstrates

​ @Robert Crawford Wow, this is an old comment. I agree with you re Wittgenstein, neo-pragmatism, the later developments in analytic philosophy that followed Russell. I've learnt much more about that since I wrote the above comment. Russell still deserves enormous credit as a pioneer and one of the fathers of modern analytic philosophy. I still think I was right, though - at least in a certain part of the popular imagination, Russell was a one-dimensional, hyperlogical thinker to whom certain thoughts and experiences were alien. The boldness, lucidity and popularity of his style augmented this impression. But a closer study of his intellectual development and corpus as a whole I still think reveals a more subtle, multi-faceted and profound intellect.

Yes. As is pretty common. It certainly wasn't the best movement for philosophy at all.

Absolutely. Of course, he was a romantic figure himself... Constantly at odds with society, with women, and with himself, haunted by the spectres of madness and solitude.

​@@thelivingalchemist You can be romantic AND mock the romantic movement. I would say im pretty romantic too, but its just a fiction world i creat and thats pretty mockable id say

"dònt believe in an unconscious" ? - Simply not the case.