 It is all the more striking, of course, that the politics of the later Schlegel, as he takes up a position in the Austrian court, turn decisively more conservative. His late essay “Signature of the Age” (Signatur des Zeitalters, 1820) attacks the twin evils of idealism and British-American parliamentary government. As opposed to the machine-like state, Schlegel advocates as his ideal an “organic” Christian state consisting of “corporations” that form a living whole around the monarch (church, school, family, guild—a series of social institutions similar to that visible in the corporatist philosophy espoused in Hegel’s philosophy of right during the same time period).