The Dallas Morning News. All Rights Reserved. British Film Inst. For Rousseau, the Swiss Protestant reformer, no hierarchy comes from nature. Politics can be reshaped by human will, for human benefit.
Romanticism regards hierarchy as a repressive social fiction.
But man is biologically a hierarchical animal. When one hierarchy is removed, another automtically springs up to take its place. The great irony of Romanticism is that a movement predicated on freedom will compulsively reenslave itself to imaginative orders even more fixed. Nature, hailed by Rousseau and Wordsworth as a benevolent mother, is a dangerous guest. The ancient cult-followers of Dionysus knew that subordination to nature is a crucifixion and dismemberment.