Schiller develops a Leibnizian sense of perfection as the unity of unity and multiplicity, and draws out its political implications. He defends a republican order of spontaneous beauty, emergent in freedom, against imposed perfection. In addressing the problems of the incipient modern division of labour and the prospects for political community, he defends variety against uniformity, while distinguishing historically progressive from regressive types of diversity. Schiller insists on processes of aesthetic self-formation and determinability, which make possible a mutual adjustment of interests as an achievable practical outcome, rather than as a metaphysical presupposition. Interests in modern civil society are diverse and troublingly fragmentary, but potentially reconcilable.