Politic and economy in German Romanticism. A counterpoint around hermeneutics of Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin

This paper aims at analyzing the relationship between politics and economics in the light of the statements of Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin concerning German Romanticism. Their interpretations of Romanticism allow to relate the political-economy dyad with the question concerning modern technique and individualism. In this sense, from Schmitt's view, as shown in Political Romanticism (1919) and in The Epoch of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations (1929), Romanticism articulates the tension between politics and economy in the particular context of denial and neutralization of the political. Accordingly, the following lines seek to highlight an intimate connection between the perspectives of both authors, contending that Benjamin's formulas of an "aestheticization of politics" and of a "politicization of art" established in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936) can be read as a reply to Schmitt's postulate of a "romantic aestheticism".