Rousseau and Romanticism

The question: What is the relation between romanticism and the philosophy of J.-J. Rousseau? - it sounds like a very simple question, but the more one considers it, the more difficult it becomes.

I don't have an answer.  Every attempt I can think of as a potential answer to that question fails.

It's not even that I think that Rousseau is that profound or great of a thinker.  I think he's... okay.  But he's not in my personal pantheon of great thinkers.

But the difficulty of thinking about Rousseau comes in retrospect.  It's difficult for us, as (post?-)Romantic thinkers, to try to come to terms with Rousseau's philosophy.  That's what makes Rousseau worth digging into.  It's not about him.  It's about us. 

I can think of several potential answers to the question: What is the relation between romanticism and the philosophy of J.-J. Rousseau, and they're all wrong.

In fact, I would say that each attempt to answer this question corresponds to a different "Gestalt des Bewusstseins" (shape of consciousness) in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.  You could almost say that the Phenomenology of Spirit is a long way of trying to answer that question - or, more accurately, a long way of not answering that question, because each of these shapes of consciousness fails.

A while ago I wrote an essay about Ayn Rand. I was trying to write it in a style that would be convincing to a follower of Ayn Rand - an immanent criticism of Ayn Rand, as it were.  But perhaps a deeper criticism of Ayn Rand's work would be to say that she fails to comprehensively conceive the situation of romanticism.  Rand's "Objectivism" might correspond to that first Gestalt des Bewusstseins, truth as sense certainty, or perhaps the second, perception.  To be a bit glib, you could say that Ayn Rand's worldview is like that of Emile before he begins his education.