The great German idealists from Kant to Hegel saw this idealism or nihilism as a reductio ad absurdum of any philosophy, and so they struggled by all conceptual means to avoid it.
Frederick C. BeiserThe romantics were reacting against a modern culture that divided individuals from themselves (through specialisation in the division of labor), from others (the competitive market place) and from nature, which had been reduced down to a machine through technology. The antidote to such division is unity and wholeness, which means feeling at home again in the world.
Frederick C. BeiserThe absolute as the idea is neither subjective nor objective; it is the intellectual structure under which they are subsumed.
Frederick C. BeiserLiberals and leftists are not wrong in describing romanticism as reactionary, because it did indeed become that after 1810. The problem is that they make that description true of the movement as a whole, as if romanticism were essentially reactionary.
Frederick C. Beiser