Dialectic of Romanticism presents a radical new assessment of the aesthetic and philosophical history and future of modernity. An exploration of the critique of modernism treats romanticism as central to the development of European modernism alongside the enlightenment and similarly subject to its own dead-ends and fatalities. The book also recovers concepts of civilization and civic aesthetics which are simultaneously modern and classically inspired - and provides a counter both to romantic historicism and enlightened models of progress. Finally, a retrospective critique of modernism analyses what happens to modernism's romantic-archaic and technological-futurist visions when they are translated from Europe to America. Dialectic of Romanticism argues that out of the European dialectic of romanticism and enlightenment a new dialectic of modernity is emerging in the New World - one which points beyond modernism and postmodernism.