For Berlin, the Romantics set in motion a vast unparalleled revolution in humanity's view of itself. They destroyed the traditional notions of objective truth and validity in ethics with incalculable, all-pervasive results. As he said of the Romantics elsewhere: "The world has never been the same since, and our politics and morals have been deeply transformed by them. Certainly this has been the most radical, and indeed dramatic, not to say terrifying, change in men's outlook in modern times."

In these brilliant lectures Berlin surveys the myriad attempts to define Romanticism, distills its essence, traces its developments from its first stirrings to its apotheosis, and shows how its lasting legacy permeates our own outlook Combining the freshness and immediacy of the spoken word with Berlin's inimitable eloquence and wit the lectures range over a cast of the greatest thinkers and artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including Kant Rousseau, Diderot, Schiller, Schlegel, Novalis, Goethe, Blake, Byron, and Beethoven. Berlin argues that the ideas and attitudes held by these and other figures helped to shape twentieth-century nationalism, existentialism, democracy, totalitarianism, and ourideas about heroic individuals, individual self-fulfillment and the exalted place of art This is the record of an intellectual bravura performance of one of the century's most influential philosophers dissecting and assessing a movement that changed the course of history.