ABSTRACT
The idea of romantic political economy might seem odd today, but it is actually much easier to set out the romantic approach to economic questions than it is to characterize romanticism as a whole. The rationalist and romantic doctrines can be approached as divergent responses to the eighteenth-century critique of knowledge. Romantic thought puts economic transactions in the same category as ritual events. At the foundation of romantic social thought is the idea that a society is built out of and depends on common understandings and shared meanings. Romantics rejected the idea of a "world economy" as a meaningful unit, and favored national currencies over international money because they saw national currencies as facilitating national commerce. Romantic critics from Fichte to Ruskin, therefore, took issue with the free-trade conclusions of rationalist political economy and traced their logic back to fundamental assumptions of individualism and abstract method.
