Abstract

This essay is concerned with Schiller, but it investigates themes that can also be found in other writers, especially in Hegel and Marx. All of these writers attempt (and ultimately fail) to work out a particular ideal model for labor and political institutions. This model was patterned after the ideal cultural conditions of ancient Greece and based upon modern aesthetic concepts, espe cially the concept of a synthesis between sense and reason. It was a model designed to overcome fragmentation or alienation in the modern world that had been brought about by the development of the division of labor.