CONCEPT
The Romantic Will
Berlin's account of the Romantic movement's central insight — that the human will is not a passive faculty that discovers pre-existing values but an
active, creative force that makes values — and the myth of individual authorship that insight generated.
In his 1965 Mellon Lectures, later published as
The Roots of Romanticism, Berlin argued that Romanticism was not merely an aesthetic movement but a revolution in human self-understanding — the most profound since the rise of Christianity. Its central insight was that the human will is not a passive faculty that discovers pre-existing values but an active, creative force that makes values, that the artist, the hero, the authentic individual does not find meaning in the world but creates it through the sheer force of creative self-
expression. This is the Romantic myth of creativity, and its influence on
the culture of creative work is so pervasive as to be almost invisible: the creator as autonomous individual answerable only to their own vision; the creative act as an expression of irreducible personal authenticity; the work of art as a unique emanation of a unique sensibility that cannot be replicated. Berlin was both attracted