Romanticism, Aesthetics, and Nationalism. By David Aram Kaiser. Cambridge Studies in Romanticism, 34. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999. Pp. xiv + 154. $49.95.

"When I hear the word 'culture,'" the artist Barbara Kruger says in one of her placard-style aphorisms, "I get out my checkbook." In this version of Pavlovian response, Kruger wittily casts the twentieth-century notion of culture as sanctimonious charity rather than aesthetic cultivation, as passive appreciation rather than active engagement. It was not always thus. Theorists since the eighteenth century have suggested different pictures of the relationship between culture and the individual, as David Aram Kaiser's Romanticism, Aesthetics, and Nationalism reminds us. Kaiser is far less interested in Romanticism or nationalism per se than in what he calls "aesthetic statism" (1)-the idea of a mutual relationship between the individual and the collective, between aesthetic and political spheres. Kaiser's illuminating survey is centrally concerned with the ways in which thinkers from Schiller to Habermas have conceived of the mediation between these realms; and it is useful both as a synoptic introduction to their writings and as a deft analysis of the philosophical correspondences among them.

Christopher R. Miller