ABSTRACT
Romantics and rationalists collaborated in splitting political economy away from natural science during the nineteenth century, and did so by making "its proper domain of inquiry mental phenomena". Romantics had a particularly strong interest in detaching Economics from natural science, which they saw as mechanistic, materialist, and universalist. They were also, like rationalist modernists, deeply invested in the idea of correspondence between individual psychology and a social whole. Both romantics and rationalists came to identify the social whole with the nation, ending up with a thin and socially evacuated conception of the global. This shared understanding of scale became the basis for a shared investment in portraying global capitalism as a mighty world-spirit. Neo-romantics needed no persuading that "capitalism" has a single, terrible, animating spirit. The voice ventriloquized by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was just what they thought capitalism would sound like.
