The relations between classical German drama and bourgeois ideals, the articulation of aesthetics, politics and morals in the work of Lessing and Schiller, are some of the axes that focus the complex and fruitful study of Jose L. Villacañas. As the author points out, only today, in a heroic age. The forgetfulness of this experience generated forms of revolutionary optimism that we have today, but which the authors studied have already dismissed.