This work offers an analysis of early Romanticism that breaks away from traditional interpretations that interpret it either from the perspective of Fichte and Goethe, or as an anticipation of some Hegelian considerations, or as a derivation of Schiller's poetic considerations, thus reducing it either to an anticipation of the postmodern, or to an apolitical movement, or to a merely literary fact.
Beiser, on the contrary, demonstrates here that the aesthetics of early Romanticism presupposes epistemological and political ends that cannot be reduced to a mere aesthetic question, at the same time that the contributions of the aesthetics of early Romanticism cannot be understood except in the light of its epistemological, metaphysical, and political foundations.