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connotations of the English word “popular” constrain its use. Herder’s evolutionary conception of the power of folk art is a fundamental idea of this era, one that informs art appreciation and aesthetics into the twentieth century. Herder carries his ideas about the development of art into the study of history and here his ideas are equally stimulating and influential. History must reflect the stages through which cultures have passed. The variety of these layers should be shown in full rather than merely allowing the illumination of the bright spots of history and culture to enlighten us. We ought to envision the entire spectrum of cultural experience. If one could only annul the dire consequences of the mystical nationalism that Herder inspires, cultural studies would not seem such a late-twentieth-century phenomenon. Now for the purposes of our inquiry, Herder’s contention that each people is individual, develops its own particular culture, and asserts itself through national forms, is most important. Yet, he was not without his opponents. Late in the nineteenth century, Ernest Renan countered that “nation” should not be linked with “people,” that the patrie is not based on “race” but on ideas. Renan asserted that if irrational ethnicity prevailed over his concept of rational nationality, “it would destroy European civilization.”23 (Renan’s ideas have gained new currency through the work of Benedict Anderson and Homi Bhabha, among others.) Renan used the Roman Empire, Switzerland, and the United States as examples of nations without “blood” or even language to bind them together.
Interestingly, it is just after the so-called “national era” that Herder‘s “democratic” conception of culture entered the forum of American debate. The American transcendentalists, led by Ralph Waldo Emerson, and later Walt Whitman all by himself, were to make much of the idea of the uniqueness of national culture. Nevertheless, we see the presentation of the American identity on the stage long before this. The reality of variegated