“The Romantic era is mainly studied by literary critics, which may be the reason it is not considered as a larger historical shift, comparable with such great movements in history as the Renaissance, the Reformation, or the Enlightenment.  But Isaiah Berlin argued that Romanticism is even more important to modern ways of thinking than are any later developments:

“The importance of Romanticism is that it is the largest recent movement to transform the lives and the thought of the Western world.  This seems to me to be the greatest single shift in the consciousness of the West that has occurred, and all the other shifts which have occurred in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries appear to me in comparison less important, and at any rate deeply influenced by it.”

—  Gary Wills and Isaiah Berlin, Head and Heart, 2007