The question with which I started, however, remains: How did such ideas—ideas originally floated in elite intellectual circles—become not simply the common currency of our society but so deeply embedded in such that most people never reflect on them in any critical or self-conscious way and are apparently convinced that they are simply a natural part of our existence? To understand that, we need to see how ideas akin to those of Rousseau served to reshape culture more generally. And that brings us to the artistic movement known as Romanticism.
