The July 1830 Revolution in Paris, followed by the deaths of the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe over the ensuing two years, marked a caesura in German political and cultural history. While the poet Heinrich Heine proclaimed the end of autonomous art and a change in aesthetics from romantic subjectivity to political action, the historian Georg Gottfried Gervinus demanded the end of art in any form. According to his radically functional conception of aesthetics, art had fulfilled and exhausted its historical role; the turn to direct political involvement in Germany had begun. Political involvement meant for him, however, not revolutionary activism but careful study of the historical foundation of contemporary society to reveal the forces and movement of ideas that inform political action. Though the inaccuracy of his predictions in the short term led to charges of false prophecy, in hindsight Gervinus's dire prognostications...