 Although Schlegel’s importance for ethical, social and political philosophy has often been ignored or unjustly criticized, recent interpreters have shown how Schlegel took himself as offering a response to a number of key challenges in the philosophical ethics of his era, from Jacobian worries about nihilism (Gorodeisky 2011) to Kantian rigorism and dualism (Crowe 2010). For the young Schlegel, consideration of ethical and political matters was never far removed from consideration of the aesthetic. Like Schleiermacher and the young Hegel, Schlegel puts a strong emphasis in his early ethical writings on the notion of love. In his essay “On the Limits of the Beautiful” (Über die Grenzen des Schönen, 1794), he argues that love is the highest form of aesthetic enjoyment and can only be realized between free and equal beings (Beiser 1992, 248). Part of Schlegel’s larger political animus lay always (in early as well as late phases of his career) in a refashioning of the relationship between the sexes. In his early phase, Schlegel shared with other Romantics a sense of the political and social importance of the revolutionary period. In his “Essay on the Concept of Republicanism occasioned by the Kantian Tract Perpetual Peace” (Versuch über den Begriff des Republikanismus, 1797), a commentary on sections of Kant’s Perpetual Peace, Schlegel moves to a far more democratic view of politics than Kant defended: Schlegel advocates not only the “necessarily democratic” nature of republicanism and the “majesty” of the people as expressed in a majority, as well as the “political imperative” of making all nations republican, but—especially decisive against Kant’s restrictions on political activism—argued that insurrection was legitimate in certain cases. Schlegel’s political radicalism in this period comes much closer to Fichte than Kant and, in fact, rivals the claims for universal extension of suffrage advocated by Herder and Georg Forster.