Gottfried Herder was one of Kant's most perceptive students. He learned much from Kant though it is fashionable to regard Herder as a kind of anti-Kant (in the same way that Aristotle is no longer remembered as the Platonist that late ancient and medieval philosophers understood him to be). Kant's relative obtuseness to history helped to spur Herder on to his great intellectual achievements--in history and historicism.
Romanticism follows the line from Kant to Herder just a surely as it follows the line from Kant to Fichte and on to Hegel.
The Enlightenment gave birth not to a single or monolithic Romanticism but to an unruly brood of Romanticisms. Had Kant not been Kant, Herder would not have been Herder. Let us give credit where (and how) it is due.
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