Asko Nivala: The Romantic Idea of the Golden Age in Friedrich Schlegel’s Philosophy of History. Routledge, New York 2017, PREVIEW / ORDER.

The nineteenth-century Romantic understanding of history is often confused with the longing for the past Golden Age. In this book, the Romantic idea of Golden Age is seen from a new angle by discussing it in the context of Friedrich Schlegel’s works. Interestingly, Schlegel argued that the concept of a past Golden Age in the beginning of history was itself a product of antiquity, imagined without any historical ground. The Golden Age was not bygone for Schlegel, but to be produced in the future. His utopian vision of the Kingdom of God was related to the millenarian expectations of perpetual peace aroused by the revolutionary wars. Schlegel understood current era through the kairos concept, which emphasized the present possibilities for public agency. Thus history could not be reduced to any kind of pre-established pattern of redemption, for the future was determined only by the opportunities manifested in the present time.

Asko Nivala: “Catastrophic Revolution and the Rise of Romantic Bildung”, Travelling Notions of Culture in Early Nineteenth-Century Europe. Eds. Hannu Salmi, Asko Nivala, Jukka Sarjala. Routledge, New York 2015, pp. 19-37, PREVIEW / ORDER.

I discuss the rise of Romantic ‘Bildung’ at the turn of the nineteenth century with a special emphasis on Friedrich Schlegel, but referring also to other famous Romantics such as William Wordsworth and Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg, 1772–1801). First, I will outline the rise of Romantic ‘Bildung’ in relation to the French Revolution, which was compared with a sublime natural disaster. Second, I will show how the Revolution was conceived in a spatial framework of the geographic ‘border’, which distanced one’s own country from the French turmoil. The third part of this chapter will argue that the early nineteenth-century Romantic juxtaposition of ‘Bildung’ and ‘civilisation’ was based on a rehabilitation of periphery (countryside) and semiperiphery (small medieval towns) as the sites of original national ‘Bildung’, against Paris as the universal centre of civilisation. This chapter will thus thematise a hidden tension in the Romantic concept of culture: its dual reference to (1) the ontological separation between nature’s mechanical necessity and human freedom, and (2) to the geographic borderlines and topographical differences between national cultures.

Hannu Salmi, Asko Nivala, Jukka Sarjala (eds.): Travelling Notions of Culture in Early Nineteenth-Century Europe. Routledge, New York 2015, PREVIEW / ORDER.

The notions of culture and civilization are at the heart of European self-image. This book focuses on how space and spatiality contributed to defining the concepts of culture and civilization and, conversely, what kind of spatial ramifications ‘culture’ and ‘civilization’ entailed. These questions have vital importance to the understanding of this formative period of modern Europe.