The romantics really did want to romanticise the world itself, and that meant re-creating the state, society and even nature so that it became a work of art.

The absolute as the idea is neither subjective nor objective; it is the intellectual structure under which they are subsumed.

The connection between romantic politics and aesthetics is plain in Schiller's and Novalis's concept of the aesthetic or poetic state.

There is a sinister anachronistic interpretation of the aesthetic state as some kind of totalitarian regime that puts aesthetic over moral standards; one associates it with national-socialism. But this has nothing to do with the romantics, whose ideal of the aesthetic state has much more to do with the republican tradition.

The romantics really did want to romanticise the world itself, and that meant re-creating the state, society and even nature so that it became a work of art.

The aesthetic dimension of the ideal state comes out in the idea of harmony, which is the classical idea of beauty as "concinnitas" or "unity-in-variety".

To live well is to live in harmony with ourselves, others and nature, and that idea of harmony is, of course, an aesthetic one.