DELIBERATE REGRESSION: The Disastrous History of Romantic Individualism in Thought and Art, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to 20th-Century Fascism

by Robert Harbison ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 1980

Obfuscation on the grand scale. Harbison is a freelance critic with a fluent, ""painterly"" style and a view of history so outrageously whimsical and one-sided that it vitiates his entire argument. Though he never states it in so many words, Harbison's central thesis, as suggested in the subtitle, concerns the supposed logical progression from the childishness, primitivism, and general self-indulgence of Romantic (in the broad sense!) artists to the horrors of Nazism and Stalinism. Just how this astonishing causal (?) connection worked is hard to say, because Harbison is too taken up with his detailed, and sometimes perceptive, analyses of artistic decadence to explain it. (From time to time he ventures impressionistic judgments such as ""Pugin's, Ruskin's, and Morris's dream of a unified existence infused by piety comes true in Hitler and Stalin."") In the process he begs all sorts of fundamental questions. What were the Romantic individualists regressing from? (Enlightenment rationality?) How does the work of a handful of cultural villains mesh with the political, economic, social, etc. forces promoting totalitarianism? What about the libertarian commitment--surely beyond serious dispute--of the figures he attacks (Rousseau, Blake, Chateaubriand, Morris, etc.)? Despite the elegance, or preciosity, of his language, Harbison fails, in the end, because he's too vague and sloppy. What does it mean, exactly, to say that Watteau's ""enthusiasm for the feminine"" partook of a redeeming ascetical dissatisfaction ""alien to the rest of the century, which first sank comfortably back into an indoor ideal less dreamlike and problematic?"" Harbison appears to have many gifts, but in this overwrought, wrong-headed study he continually misuses them.

Pub Date: May 1, 1980

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1980

Categories: NONFICTION