The Roots of Cultural Liberalism

The is a pretty good summary.

I’ve never seen post-liberals, reactionaries or White Nationalists bring up the true origins of cultural liberalism.

The following excerpt comes from Henry F. May’s book The End of American Innocence, 1912-1917:

“It was not the fervent romanticism of an earlier period, though it drew on the romanticism of all times. The new believers in art did not expect, as Coleridge had for instance, that intuition would transfigure and illuminate the universe. They did not hope, like Ruskin, that beauty would ennoble society. Art did not necessarily lead to to any truth but its own; there might not be any other kind of truth for it to lead to. Aesthetic values, down to the last delicate nuance, must be cultivated for their own sakes, desperately, without regard to ordinary morality, if necessary at the cost of madness and despair.

In 1857, the same year that Flaubert published Madame Bovary, caricaturing the old romanticism, Charles Baudelaire inaugurated the new with Flowers of Evil, the bible of the antimoralists. Unlike many of his followers, Baudelaire meant what he said and was superbly able to say it. In his famous invocation he recognized as the worst of mental monsters, the most likely source of horror and destruction, an apparition fully familiar to Europeans in the nineteenth century but hardly glimpsed in busy America: Ennui.

Baudelaire and his followers made a cult of Edgar Allan Poe, admiring in him exactly the qualities which American critics continually deplored: his febrile intensity, his love of exotic and bizarre subjects, his rejection of modern civilization, and his insistence that “Poetry” was independent of moral judgment. For three quarters of a century after Baudelaire, a series of schools of poets moved further into many kinds of moral and technical experiment. French verse, fertile, various, and brilliant, experimental in both form and point of view, became the single most importance influence on Western Literature. Its great figures, particularly Mallarmé, Verlaine, and