Arguments about the relationship between market and state are today usually referred to the competence of specialised knowledge within the political and economic sciences. Historical expeditions, on the other hand, which seek to excavate earlier forms of such arguments from the past will often have to move into foreign territory. Evans's contribution to this volume (p. 13–18) has shown how much nineteenth-century doctrines of laisser-faire owed to the influence of theology. This chapter will look at the polemical opposition of "markets' and "communities' that developed from an essentially aesthetic viewpoint in the tradition of German and English romanticism.³ Most readers will associate the characteristic features of romantic art or, more generally, of a romantic temperament with a disposition of intense introspection and exuberance of feeling. Overshadowed by such preconceptions, the ideal of community can easily be misrepresented as but the projection of "romantic" nostalgia — of the poet's flight from the prosaic realities of the modern world: "Rosebushes and poor rates, rather than steam engines and independence".⁴