 For over a century, romanticism has standardly been regarded as a reaction against the Enlightenment (e.g., Haym 1870). The primacy of aesthetics may seem to speak in favor of this story because, on this interpretation, the romantics replaced the Enlightenment’s faith in the sovereignty of reason with a belief in the sovereignty of art and the affective and imaginative capacities that are involved in aesthetic experience. On this traditional interpretation, romanticism is antirationalist or irrationalist. But, while the romantic pursuit of the primacy of aesthetics marks a break with the Enlightenment, regarding romantic aesthetics as antirational or irrational and as antagonistic to the core Enlightenment values is unjustified for a host of reasons (cf. Beiser 2003, Engell 1981, Gregory 2005).