RaveThe Washington Post... engaging and often profound ... presents a thrilling picture of university life, one less and less familiar in our own moment of hypermediated education and continuing devaluation of the humanities ... Wulf paints a moving collective portrait of these intellectuals as they struggled to embody their revolutionary ideals ... Wulf also shows how important were the women in this intellectual circle, who lived out their own experiments in liberation. Thus, Caroline Schlegel, August Wilhelm’s wife, who was a translator and critic in her own right, plays a crucial role in the story, its biographical and emotional pivot ... At its most ambitious, Magnificent Rebels concerns the relationships between philosophy and politics, thought and action. It explores the tension between the inwardness of Romantic philosophy and the ethical or political aspirations of its practitioners, nearly all of whom supported the French Revolution ... Despite the complex arguments developed by its main characters, the book vividly conveys the drama of ideas. It captures the unique pleasures of communal thinking as well as the suffering and the sense of betrayal that mark a community’s dissolution. There is plenty of erotic drama here too, since the rebellion Wulf describes was sexual as much as anything. For the Romantics, as we see in detail, free thinking and free love were inseparable, and the personal consequences were often excruciating ... When the book seeks to communicate its subjects’ ideas — some of which are notoriously obscure — it can fall into oversimplification. It sometimes unnecessarily avoids the language used by the Romantics themselves ... And important precursors such as Rousseau and Kant are mentioned only briefly. Still, Magnificent Rebels shows with great lucidity how the Romantic desire to liberate the self still shapes our sense of who we are — or who we might strive to be.
