Astute contemporary commentators such as Karl Mannheim recognized both the originality of Freedom and Form and its continuity with Cassirer's earlier work. Summarizing the text in 1917, Mannheim writes, “Cassirer transforms the concepts of Freedom and Form into functional concepts […] with the theory recently applied to the history of exact science in his last book (Substance and Function).” Freedom and Form presents an outline of a theory of liberal civilization that is the culmination of Cassirer's functional model of form, which his narrative recasts through an alternative history of German classicism. Although the political format of the text is new, however, its core argument is already initiated in The Knowledge Problem, particularly the lapidary introduction to the series. Cohen and others immediately recognized that the content of The Knowledge Problem provided a comprehensive historical foundation for the Marburg school project in an interlocking series of readings ranging from Nicholas of Cusa, Leibniz and Shaftesbury, through Humboldt, Kant and Hegel. Its most important innovation, however, was found in the form and style of the text itself, which was integral to its overall argument that the critical study of different forms of knowledge in history is the basis of an ethics not of autonomy and the individual person, but of the historical forms and sciences that create the individual, whether defined objectively or subjectively.