Abstract

Emphasising the cultural, historical and sociological aspects of reason – aspects that were not considered neither by Kant nor by Garve – in his Metakritik über den Purismum der Vernunft, Johann Georg Hamann has not only become the ‘founding father’ of the romantic Sturm und Drang. He has inaugurated a specific kind of criticism as well that will gradually leave its mark upon the philosophical scene from the end of the nineteenth century up till now. In this article, I would like to focus upon the influence that was exerted by Hamann’s metacritique on the Anglo-Saxon philosophy of culture, as it becomes obvious in the work of, among others, R.G. Collingwood, Isaiah Berlin and Charles Taylor.