The intellectual, artistic, and political movement that arose in Europe in the late 18th century as a reaction against Enlightenment rationalism — emphasizing emotion, imagination, nature, the individual, and the organic — whose influence on art, literature, music, philosophy, and politics has been so pervasive that we still live within it.
The Enlightenment said: reason is the key to human progress. Romanticism said: reason is only part of what we are, and the most important parts — feeling, imagination, beauty, belonging — cannot be captured by it. The argument between them has never ended. Every debate about the limits of science, the value of tradition, or the claims of community against the individual is in some sense a continuation of this argument.