Hegel remains of great importance to understand ourselves, but essentially because we have all grown out of a reaction against Hegel.

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

There was no Prussian bastion to stop the Scotsman's swift conquest of the territory once claimed by reason.

Royce is the father of the thesis that German idealism is a story about the discovery and development of the Kantian transcendental ego - the "I" that accompanies all my representations - as an absolute cosmic supersubject who, god-like, creates the entire universe.

No one nowadays talks about the absolute, not even people with firm and deep religious convictions. The whole Hegelian project has no resonance for us, as it once had for the Germans in the 1820s and the British and Americans around the 1880s.

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.