Arguably, one of the more significant effects of Enlightenment rationalism is in consigning everything outside of itself -- literally, every other notion in existence -- to romanticism and historicism. More specifically, that just these notions and ways of thinking are what are to stand for rationality. Even just looking at it in terms of legal doctrines, many that found a place on the historicist agenda were thought to be very rational at the time they were made.
And now the present order of things similarly consigns all thoughts outside itself to history, which is to say, the story that it intends to tell.
.....
Reading Foldenyi's history of melancholy. I recall reading his Dostoyevski/Hegel at a coffeehouse on the rebuilt large stone bridge in Mostar, arguably one of the centers of effective world-history in recent times. (The bridge was bathed in blue light at the time in celebration of the EU accession.) Surprised to learn that he's a theatre scholar, sort of in the Robertson Davies Anglo-Canadian correlative, perhaps. Learning that, the first thing that I did was to start reading his primary sources. Theatres make plays, and theatre scholars are sometimes similarly very useful in pointing out useful things that they themselves attempt to serve, rather than surpass. (I'm certain that the Great Scott had a big hand in this text.)
(And I say this as a scholar and theatre person who was given a Robertson Davies novel as a vade mecum by the head of the masters conservatory.)