ABSTRACT
Philosophy and ordinary common sense co-operating to bring about the downfall of metaphysics, there was seen the strange spectacle of a cultured nation without metaphysics - like a temple richly ornamented in other respects but without a holy of holies. This chapter focuses on a recurrent, paradoxical aspect of post-Kantian philosophy's institution which continues to dominate discussion, and which might be telegraphically expressed as 'the void of its institution'. Michel Foucault famously turns not only towards the 'birth of the clinic' and the modern prison system, but also to the question of the social functions served by such 'institutions' as 'philosophy' and 'literature' and of their teaching. The question of the relation between 'history' and 'the writing of history' proves a leverage-point for various institutional rewritings of Romanticism. The main points around which contemporary methodological and ideological arguments circle can almost always be traced directly back to the romantic heritage.
