Wild Politics: Political imagination in German Romanticism

Abstract

The political discourse of German Romanticism is often interpreted reductively: as either entirely revolutionary, reactionary, or indeed apolitical in nature. Breaking with this critical tradition, this dissertation offers a new conceptual framework for political Romanticism called "wild politics". I argue that Romantic wild politics generates a sense of possibility that calls into question pragmatic forms of implementing sociopolitical change; it envisions imaginative alternatives to the status quo that exceed the purview of conventional political thinking. Three major fields of the Romantic political imaginary organize this reading: affect, nature, and religion.