The Romantic movement was born of radical intellectual and political change, notably the disintegration of the idealism of the Enlightenment in the face of the wars and unrest that convulsed Europe in the quarter-century after the 1789 French Revolution.
As American writer Edith Wharton said, (1862-1937) "In spite of illness, in spite even of the archenemy sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways".
Miss McCarthy establishes a utopia of urban intellectuals on a New England mountaintop and lets us watch their disintegration as they seek to dig in on the glassy slopes of their hitherto untested ideals.
When asked to name the dominant theme of the right's intellectual history since George W Bush left office, conservative journalist Michael Brendan Dougherty responded with one word: "disintegration".
Ratification of the declaration would, the Brotherhood claimed on its website this week, "lead to the complete disintegration of society, and would certainly be the final step in the intellectual and cultural invasion of Muslim countries".
"This declaration, if ratified, would lead to complete disintegration of society, and would certainly be the final step in the intellectual and cultural invasion of Muslim countries, eliminating the moral specificity that helps preserve cohesion of Islamic societies," the brotherhood 's statement claimed.
The disintegration of individual symbols and the change in the emphasis on the role of symbolism in general are partly consequences of cultural, intellectual, social, and economic transformations.
But so has disintegration.
The Soviet Union's disintegration.
