Herder is the originator, the author, not of nationalism as is sometimes said, although no doubt some of his ideas entered nationalism, but of something – I do not quite know what name to give it – much more like populism. That is to say (to instance its more comical forms), he is the originator of all those antiquarians who want natives to remain as native as possible, who like arts and crafts, who detest standardisation – everyone who likes the quaint, people who wish to preserve the most exquisite forms of old provincialism without the impingement on it of some hideous metropolitan uniformity. Herder is the father, the ancestor, of all those travellers, all those amateurs, who go round the world ferreting out all kinds of forgotten forms of life, delighting in everything that is peculiar, everything that is odd, everything that is native, everything that is untouched. In that sense he did feed the streams of human sentimentality to a very high degree. At any rate, that is Herder’s temperament and that is why, since he wants everything to be what it can be as much as possible, that is to say, develop itself to its richest and fullest extent, the notion that there can be one single ideal for all men, everywhere, becomes unintelligible.
From Isaiah Berlin’s excellent book The Root of Romanticism.
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