In this light, we understand that the shift from Gemeinschaft to Gessellschaft propogated much of the Romantic movement. People like Thomas Carlyle and Thomas Hardy, or Sir Walter Scott, these men understood the trauma of the sudden shift, and thus was birthed Romantic literature, wherein one looked to the past or the fantastical as a crutch for the new and frightening world. Indeed, the Romantics were reacting to trauma, and created their own little worlds to alleviate the pain that society was experiencing, what with coal smog in the cities, to the degree one could no longer breathe. What better way to alleviate that wretchedness of existence than to read the chivalrous "Ivanhoe?" Thomas Carlyle wrote extensively of his travels to London with clear pictures of the chaos, where neighbor was pitted against neighbor, competing for wages. The new society was highly impersonal, many factory owners did not know the workers that they employed, they were commodities. Thus the Romantic period in art, where beautiful natural scenes were depicted, a stark contrast from the reality of machinery and smog. Also, there was a trend to paint popular cities and landmarks in ruins, perhaps an apocalyptic vision of what they wished would happen.
I believe that I have said enough on this issue, and perhaps from understanding this, we can also get a sense of the direction our society is moving today. We still carry the trauma and pathology from the Industrial Revolution, and there are many today who simply cannot adapt to this Gessellschaft world. This is identified as Neurosis, in the sense that Sigmund Freud understood. We are addicted to mood enhancers, to "happy pills," merely because we are so stressed, and are not adapting well to the demands we put on ourselves. And so we live our lives still in the Romantic, wishing for something else, and often not adapting.
