Walter Benjamin's dissertation, Concept of Art-criticism in German is one of the least studied of all his major works, yet it is of decisive importance for understanding the direction of his later work. I The purpose of this essay is to untangle the complex of issues and motives which lie behind this text, by focusing on how it expresses a notion of tradition in relation to literary works. This notion of tradition will be clarified by relating it both to Benjamin's earlier philosophical concern with Kant, and to his later more political thought on the concept of history. The dissertation by no means represents merely the application of a pre-formed philosophy of history to the writings of the Early German Romantics.2 Rather, as will be shown, the dissertation marks a complex interaction between Benjamin's own maturing position and the philosophy of history he divined in Early German Romanticism's concept of criticism. His dissertation may be best understood, therefore, as a honing of his critical philosophy through an engagement with thought, whereby the result of this engagement is simultaneously turned back on to yield both a work of criticism on Early German Romanticism, and a new understanding of Romantic tradition. Presented in 1919 as his doctoral dissertation, Concept of Art-criticism in German Romanticism is also Benjamin's first major work, coming three years after his essay On Language as Such and the Language of Man and two years before Task of the Translator. The subject of his study, the Early German Romantics, consisted of a group of eclectic writers and thinkers who at the turn of the ninteenth century jointly produced six issues of a journal called the Athenaeum. This group, including Friedrich and August Schlegel, Novalis, Schelling and Schleiermacher, met regularly together in Jena for about two years. Among their number were represented the disciplines of philology, translation, philosophy, theology, and poetry. Benjamin focuses particularly on the contribution of Friedrich Schlegel, whose two sets of complex and enigmatic aphorisms formed the theoretical core of the group's journal. Given the enigmatic quality of Schlegel's(3) work as well as the complex and often obscure writing of Benjamin, it is not surprising that the question of the relationship of Benjamin's own thinking to that of Early German remains in dispute. The 1992 edition of Studies in Romanticism(4) devoted to Benjamin demonstrates this well. David Ferris, in his essay, writes that Benjamin's dissertation is a commentary, rather than a work of criticism.(5) The main purpose of Rodolph Gasche's essay is to demonstrate that, although the topics considered, such as criticism and translation, are the same, and their theories closely related, Benjamin's essay maintains a massive and intransigent criticism of the romantic conception of art and its concept of criticism, and manifests an unyielding and unrelenting negative critical gesture that dominates the whole of the dissertation.(6) This view needs to be compared with that of Irving Wohlfarth in his essay Politics of Prose and the Art of Awakening.(7) Wohlfarth sees a clear influence of Early German thinking upon Benjamin's, to the extent of his taking certain lines of thought directly from them. For Wohlfarth, this throws a shadow of idealism accross Benjamin's work which fundamentally weakens its philosophical credibility. Gasche's account is unconvincing because it makes no reference to the context in which Benjamin was drawn to an engagement with the Early German Romantics: the need for a rethinking of language and time in the wake of Kant's philosophy. However, this affinity between the projects of Benjamin and Schlegel does not mean that Benjamin's work has inescapably idealist presuppositions, as Wohlfarth concludes. It is not clear, first of all, that Schlegel's work can be labelled straightforwardly idealist, and second, the complexity of Benjamin's stance towards Early German in the dissertation does not allow simple lines of lineage to be drawn. …