There are notable exceptions though: Coleridge, for instance, with his translation of Wallenstein. More importantly perhaps, the first major biography of Schiller, acclaimed by Goethe, was written by Thomas Carlyle (1825). But it was after the Second World War that several highly accomplished translators and producers devoted themselves to the plays of the author of The Ode to Joy, most notably Stephen Spender, Francis Lamport, Robert David MacDonald and Mike Poulton. The sheer musicality of Schiller's verse was brought to the fore most effectively by Verdi and his librettists in I masnadieri, Luisa Miller and Don Carlos, which closely followed Schiller's Robbers, Kabale und Liebe and Don Carlos, once casually dismissed by Kenneth Tynan as "a Spanish tragedy composed of themes borrowed from Hamlet and Phèdre". An equally masterly accomplishment was Mary Wilkinson's and Leonard Forster's translation of Schiller's highly influential treatise in letter form, The Aesthetic Education of Man, which is still debated, not only among philosophically-minded pedagogues. 

Schiller was a Shakespearian but with a clear-cut agenda that went beyond the mere depiction of the "human, all too human" in Man and his dwelling in evil. (Schiller's adaptation of a drastically shortened but beautified Macbeth for the Weimar stage, accomplished in 1800, sees Macbeth as a self-reliant character, opposed by a female devil but inspired, not guided, by the witches that resemble Greek goddesses of fate.) It was the agenda called "freedom". He posed in most of his plays the pertinent and ever so "modern" question, mostly by implication, of whether there was a form of society which could reconcile personal freedom with a sense of collective responsibility. 

In social, political and indeed legal terms, liberalism today finds itself once again at a crossroads. It is perceived as defeatist and weak, the seemingly elegant avenue of laisser faire has turned into a cul-de-sac in the aftermath of the credit crunch. Measured state intervention is the renewed order of the day, even among conservatives. The painful memories of Ground Zero have reawakened us to the dilemma of religious fundamentalism and our reactions to it have often been extreme in themselves.

But, I suggest, there is another dimension to the notion of freedom that is linked with science, reminding us of the fact that Schiller himself started as a student of medicine and human behaviour. We now live in the age of genes, which has turned, to a certain extent, into a genocracy: the deterministic view of the capabilities of Man has regained prominence. Traditionally, this view involved the belief in the evil of Man and the necessity to develop mechanisms to contain it. Thinkers from Immanuel Kant to David Hume, Edmund Burke, Adam Ferguson (one of the most important philosophical influences on Schiller), Max Picard (Hitler in Our Selves, 1946) and Leszek Kolakowski have all attempted to do just that. 

The genetic code appears to overrule human rights and to underwrite the genealogy of life. Bioethics informs our discussions on human dignity. We are led to believe that genes precondition whatever we undertake, which would result in new ramifications for our moral responsibility. Furthermore, the predominance of the genetic discourse challenges some fundamental principles of liberty, or rather, it has begun to condition and fashion them. Genocracy has done away for good, or so it seems, with one main assumption that has informed the agenda of liberal thought since Rousseau and Schiller: namely that Man was born free even if he found himself in chains.