It would be hard to find a more extravagant claim for the power of art than Friedrich Schiller's statement near the beginning of the letters On the Aesthetic Education of Man that “it is only through beauty that man makes his way to freedom.” Schiller makes this statement in defense of the aesthetic inquiry he intends to pursue in the letters. As these began appearing in his journal, Horen, in the mid-1790s, Schiller's readers were preoccupied with the revolutionary political struggle convulsing France. With this “most perfect of all the works to be achieved by the art of man – the construction of true political freedom” – hanging in the balance, Schiller writes, “is it not, to say the least, untimely” to propose to divert readers' attention to the fine arts (pp. 7–9)? It would be, he agrees, did not the tendency of events indicate such a measure – had not the struggle for liberty turned into a Reign of Terror.

To Schiller the violent turn of events in France signifies that men are not ready for the freedom they are demanding. “Man has roused himself from his long indolence and self-deception and, by an impressive majority, is demanding restitution of his inalienable rights,” Schiller writes in Letter Five. But man “is not just demanding this.” In France now, as in America, he is “rising up to seize by force what, in his opinion, has been wrongfully denied him.”