Christoph MartinWieland andJohann Gottfried Herder,who maybeevenmore
importanttothe socialist claims on cultureand education than thevenerated
Schiller.Wieland was one of the first to emphasizethe formative role of the aes-
thetic in the making ofgood citizens, especiallyinthe fight for freedom and de-
mocracy.Similarly,Herder’scharacterization of the poet asacreator of the na-
tion, his belief in languageasthe basis of national identity,and his validation
of collective individuality as the foundationofsociety resonated deeplyinsocial-
ist discourses of community thatoften treat class and folk as synonymous terms.
Their shared belief in the uniquecontribution of poets and philosopherstothe
project of aesthetic education and the establishment ofarepublic of letters,
based on eitheraclassicistdream of Hellas oravision ofauthentic folk, estab-
lished the foundation for the hoped-for convergenceofnational literature, na-
tional identity, and the nation-state and found its socialist equivalent in the
Marxist master narrative of class struggle as the onlypath to true humanity.
Theresonances of idealist philosophyinnineteenth and earlytwentieth-cen-
tury debates on culture and politics have been analyzed in two books that illus-
trate well thegenealogyofthe anti-aesthetic in culturalstudies:Terry Eagleton’s
work on the ideologyofthe aesthetic andJosef Chytry’swork on the aesthetic
state. Practicing ideologycritique as the hermeneutics of suspicion, boththeo-
rists acknowledge the significanceofthe Hellenic world asamodel of democra-
cy and public life and emphasize the heavy debt of German classicismand ro-
manticism to the aesthetic humanism henceforth identifiedwith ancient
Greece. Locatingthe aesthetic in the largertraditions of European thought
since the Enlightenment,Eagleton delineateshow aesthetic practices and de-
bates became inseparable from the political struggles of the bourgeoisie. The
aesthetic not onlyplayedakey role in creating“the dominant ideological
forms ofmodern class society,”he argues, but also provided“an unusually pow-
erful challengeand alternative to these dominant ideological forms.” ¹³Making a
similar point concerning the politics of the aesthetic, Chytry characterizes the
aesthetic state as“asocial and political community that accords primacy,al-
though not exclusiveness, to the aesthetic dimension in human consciousness
and activity.”¹⁴Theseshared convictions established the practices of aesthetic
education, public sphere, and political life and defined the broadermeaning
of polis, state, and community–but did so in the context of oppositional and
alternative public spheres.And if idealist aesthetics and bourgeois culture
Terry Eagleton,TheIdeology of theAesthetic(Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1990),3.
Josef Chytry,TheAesthetic State:AQuest inModern German Thought(Berkeley:Univ ersity of
California Press,1989), xii.
20 Introduction