Our traditional associations are 19th
century nihilists, bombs with smoking fuses on them, or hooded guys with bandanas round their mouths charging police lines at G8 summits.
Yet Romanticism's sharp antithesis of the individual's creative self - fashioning on the one hand and political, social, and religious norms on the other also sowed the seeds for variously existentialist, hedonistic, and
nihilist programs that bear much responsibility for the devastations wrought throughout the twentieth
century and into our present.