 The ending to the Letters has left many readers confused and dissatisfied, as evidenced by its mostly unfavorable reception among Schiller’s contemporaries (Wilkinson and Willoughby cxxxiii ff). Schiller seems to be unclear regarding whether the aesthetic state is the means to the achievement of full humanity or whether it is an end; he seems, in short, not to have answered one of his original questions, namely which must come first, a good state or good citizens (Roehr 2003: 133–4; Sharpe 2005: 160). Schiller has also been accused of encouraging elitism and a retreat into apoliticism through his image of an aesthetic state, a charge most powerfully leveled in the next century by Marxist critics (Sharpe 1995: 91). His theoretical movement from sensation to form, combined with his genealogy of humans' development out of a “savage” state has been cited as contributing to a “racial regime of representation” that pervades Western aesthetics (Lloyd 2019, 41–43, 72–74).  Others by contrast see the Letters as a testament to Schiller’s political engagement and republicanism (Beiser 2005: 123 ff; López 2011; Moggach 2008; Schmidt 2009). There is, in any case, no doubt that the Aesthetic Letters were enormously influential. The concept of play has been taken up and developed by philosophers such as Charles Sanders Peirce and Hans-Georg Gadamer (Wilkinson and Willoughby 1967: clxxxviii–ix; Gadamer 1975: 101–34). The idea of play specifically as a cure for alienation influenced the Frankfurt School through the writings of Herbert Marcuse: indeed, according to Terry Eagleton, “[t]he whole radical aesthetic tradition from Coleridge to Herbert Marcuse … draws sustenance from [Schiller’s] prophetic denunciation” of the modern condition (1990: 118; Marcuse 1955: 185–196; Guyer 2008; Sharpe 1991: 90–92; Saranpa 2002: 70–8). Jürgen Habermas found in Schiller’s idea of an aesthetic state a vision of a “communicative, community-building, solidarity-giving force of art” (1985: 59–64), in which art is capable of “revolutionizing the conditions of mutual understanding” (1985: 46, 49): a vision that, however problematic, he sees as a source of insight into the nature of modern politics. Samantha Matherne and Nick Riggle have recently argued for the relevance of Schiller's conceptions of both aesthetic value and freedom in the Aesthetic Letters, characterizing his theory as “a non-hedonic, action-oriented, communitarian” philosophy worth considering today (Matherne and Riggle 2020:1, 2021).