 In addition to proving the anti-Enlightenment interpretation of the romantics false, tracing these romantic notions of autonomy, Bildung and political community also offers a challenge to another well-known interpretation of the movement as apolitical (see Schmitt 1986). In contrast to this interpretation, we find the romantics exploring and emphasizing the importance of aesthetics for ethical and political concerns. Shelley, for example, wrote in a letter to a friend: “I consider Poetry subordinate to moral &amp; political science” (Shelley, LS 2: 71). In his famous Defence of Poetry (1821), he proclaimed, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” (SPP). Rather than “aestheticizing” politics, then, the romantics found in art and aesthetics resources for solving ethical and political problems.