ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by discussing Friedrich Schiller's critique of specialization, before going on to consider his suggestive but less developed ideas about how the pernicious effects of specialization can be counteracted. It focuses on two issues: Schiller and Karl Marx’s critical accounts of the pernicious effects of specialization and their positive visions about how these pernicious effects might be overcome. The chapter shows that how Marx's critique of specialization follows Schiller's quite closely, while also deepening his analysis in important respects. It suggests that revisiting Schiller and Marx's thought can illuminate some important but under-theorized questions for political philosophy. These include questions about the relationship between specialization and self-realization and about how the pernicious effects of specialization might be counteracted. The chapter argues that Marx's critique of specialization has much in common with Schiller's, but that Marx provides a more systematic account of why specialization has intensified in the way it has.
