ABSTRACT
Romantic irony in contrast is the product not of a skeptical distance from the self but rather of intensified self-consciousness. Romantic nature worship – a mix of pantheism and Gnosticism – is never far from the surface of modern societies. As the romantic idea of the nation came into wide circulation, so did the modern anti-romantic conception of the nation. Economic romanticism does something different. It aims not for rational mastery but rather irrational mastery. The Faustian imperatives of becoming and boundlessness fed an impulse to recreate an empire that was as expansive as the old ‘German-Roman’ West. The failure of the stimulated a drive toward another political economy, less Faustian yet motivated by the search for economic and social control as an alternative to axiomodernity and its political economy of patterns, paradoxes, cycles, and ratios. The most strident ones were the totalitarian states: Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and Maoist China prominent among them.
