Romantic political thought sets feeling, authenticity, rootedness and organic community against what its proponents saw as the cold rationalism, atomism and universalism of Enlightenment liberalism.
Rousseau stands at its head, though he belongs equally to the Enlightenment he criticized. His claim that civilization had corrupted a naturally decent humanity, his elevation of sentiment over calculation, and his preoccupation with authenticity, with being genuinely oneself instead of performing a role for others, supplied nearly everything later Romantic and communitarian thinkers said on those subjects. Herder added the decisive step: humanity exists only as particular peoples, each with its own language, poetry and way of being, none rankable against the others or reducible to a universal standard.
The characteristic move is a change of metaphor. Enlightenment political thought described institutions as mechanisms to be designed and adjusted. Romantics described them as organisms that grow, have a history, and die if transplanted, a figure that runs through Burke's inherited constitution, the German Romantics' state, and Coleridge's idea of a national culture.
Its descendants run in every direction, which is why the tradition resists placement on a left-right axis. Cultural nationalism, the recovery of folk languages and the nineteenth-century independence movements all descend from Herder. So do the strands of socialism that objected to industrial life on human and aesthetic grounds instead of economic ones. So do contemporary communitarian and identity-based movements. So, less comfortably, does the ethnic exclusivism that follows when the authentic community is defined by who does not belong to it. Berlin, who did more than anyone to make the Counter-Enlightenment intelligible, was explicit that he was recovering a tradition whose dangers he took entirely seriously.