Well, I intended it to be broad. I am asking about a very broad cultural movement here (if there was one, and I think there must have been). Something like The Enlightenment or The Romantic Movement. Both of those are standardly presented as affecting pretty much the whole gamut of cultural life, from the arts (high and low), through philosophy and politics, to even science (people I have seen characterized as “Romantic” scientists include Davy, Faraday, Goethe, and Oersted). There are hundreds of books about the Enlightenment and Romanticism. Surely there must be some dealing (in an equivalently broad-brush way) with whatever it was that came after.
And what should it be called? as I said, maybe it is Modernism, but I am not sure. I note that the Wikipedia entry on Modernism characterizes it as a reaction against the Enlightenment, not against Romanticism (which is what I am looking for). But surely Romanticism was already a reaction against the Enlightenment?
My impression is also that Modernism is mainly just applied to the arts, but I would be happy to be told otherwise. Has anyone argued that there were, or are, characteristically modernist philosophers, scientists, and political movements? Relativity theory and quantum mechanics are sometimes mentioned in the context of discussion of Modernism, but my impression is that the influence is presented as all going one way. Some Modernist artists and writers may have been influenced by their (probably half-baked) understanding of (small m) modern physics, but does anyone make a serious argument that the science of Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, etc. grew out of the same cultural currents (whatever they are supposed to have been) that made the artists of the time into Modernists? What about the other sciences of the era? Is there anything distinctively Modernist about neo-Darwinism, or molecular biology , or plate tectonics, or Behaviorist psychology (or Gestalt theory, or Cognitive Science), for instance?
Frankly, I have never really been able to get a very good grip on what “Modernism,” even just in the arts, is supposed to mean anyway. Sometimes it seems to be applied to artists who seem to want to embrace progress and newness (like, say, the modernist architects who built glass covered, unornamented skyscrapers celebrating the power of technology, and the utilitarianism), but the label also gets stuck prominently on thoroughly reactionary thinkers, like T.S. Eliot, for example, who seem to hate the modern world and long (although they may be very conscious of the futility of it) to go back to some idealized agrarian past, where everybody knew their place in the scheme of things. Other so called Modernists seem (to me anyway) to be celebrating messiness and complexity, like James Joyce, for instance. What the hell does Ulysses have in common with the buildings of Le Corbusier or Mies van der Rohe, or the paintings of Mondrian, with their neat colored rectangles?
Another possible candidate for the movement of anti-Romantic reaction is, I guess, Positivism. It was certainly the antithesis of Romanticism, so maybe Positivism should be seen as the reaction to Romanticism and Modernism as the counter-reaction to Positivism. But Positivism does not seem to have been a movement with nearly as much depth and resonance as the others. It is usually characterized mainly as a movement in philosophy of science (although Comte intended it to be much more, I guess). Were there really any Positivist artists or architects, or poets or politicians, or was it just science and philosophy?
My apologies for all the thinking out loud above (and all the vague generalizations). I am, to reiterate, really just looking for something good to read on this (i.e., anti-Romantic reaction).
