Schiller and «Alienation»

Schiller's contribution to the development of the Hegelian and Marxian concepts of «alienation» has been trivialised and misrepresented in recent scholarship. His role in the propagation of these ideas is shown to derive not from the second-hand contents of his «Portrait of the Age» in the «Letters on Aesthetic Education» but rather from his characteristic manner of handling his received materials. His treatment of the malaise of modern man is examined against the background of conventions governing the use of received ideas and imagery which operated in the 18th century world of discourse along with the repercussions of his portrait in Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind and Marx's «Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts» of 1844.