TB: One interesting and attractive notion which comes out of the Romantics (and more specifically from Herder) is the idea of cultural relativism, summed up best in Ranke's celebrated dictum that every age is immediate to God. In other words, one shouldn't think of the Middle Ages as being something lower down on a scale of progression which has led to the glories of the present day. Any period in the past should be understood from the inside out, and that is a constant theme of Romanticism, so that one shouldn't use the criteria and values of the late 20th century and apply them to 12th-century Brabant. If one can paraphrase that slightly, which Herder did, every culture is immediate to God; every culture has its own peculiar characteristics. What Herder wanted was that those peculiar characteristics should not be marked and ticked off according to a set of enlightened criteria of whether they're irrational or not, but should be understood from the inside out on their own terms. So cultural relativism doesn't support the notion that one should go and invade country A because they don't have the benefits of Western liberal democracy and force them  down their throats, which is why I think it makes an appeal to the present-day generation and has relevance for them. There is a contemporary political message to come out of this as well as an aesthetic and cultural message, and that is why Romanticism in this sense remains relevant, and remains attractive — at least, attractive to me.

DJ: What I would counter to that is that Ranke says "Immediate to God", so he took it for granted there was a God, and that we more or less agreed about which God. He wouldn't have questioned the basic principles of Western civilisation, would he? Not that he or any of the Romantics would have disparaged Oriental cultures or other cultures, but what seems to be different today is that even the most fundamental assumptions of Western civilisation can no longer be taken for granted. The horrors that we've seen over the last century would have been unimaginable to Romantics, wouldn't they? 

TB: Where I take issue is that the Romantics were not living in a cuddly teddy-bear sort of world. Anyone who had first-hand experience or even second-hand experience of the horrors which had been perpetrated in Paris during the Terror, and particularly during the September massacres, was well aware of the terrible things that lurked down there. Of course they couldn't have imagined the vastly greater horrors that were perpetrated by Stalin's Russia or Hitler's Germany, not least because they weren't aware of the technological developments that would make those horrors possible. But they knew what a human being was capable of doing to another human being.

DJ: You mention the abolition of the slave trade. Would the Romantics have said that it's fine for other people to have slavery, but we won't? What worries me about today's form of cultural relativism is that it excuses things we would never accept for ourselves when we see them happening elsewhere in the world. And that's something which I think the Romantics wouldn't accept. 

JB: Absolutely, and the key text here is Shelley's The Revolt of Islam, which is a searing attack on the inequalities and tyranny within Islam. He's obviously partly doing that as a veiled attack on Christianity, but he's done his research about fundamentalist Islam.