Aesthetic politics : political philosophy beyond fact and value
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Aesthetic politics : political philosophy beyond fact and value
(Mestizo spaces = Espaces métissés)
Stanford University Press, c1996
- : cloth : alk paper
- : pbk. : alk. paper
Available at 19 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Includes indexes
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Taking as its point of departure a sharp critique of Rawls's influential A Theory of Justice-which, like most Western political philosophy since the seventeenth century, considers ethics to be foundational to a proper understanding of the political-this book looks at politics from an aesthetic perspective.
To achieve this, it focuses on the notion of political "representation" as the heart of parliamentary democracy, openly welcoming and embracing all the aestheticist connotations of the term. Representation will always present us with an "aesthetic gap" between the represented and the representation; it is in this aesthetic gap that legitimate political power and all political creativity originate.
In a representative democracy, this aesthetic gap appears in the fact that the representative is not a mandatary but a delegate of the voter (possessing a certain autonomy with regard to the voter, much in the same way that a painting has a certain autonomy vis-a-vis what it depicts). This was made clear by Burke more than two centuries ago and has been the practice of well-functioning representative democracies to the present day. The author sees totalitarianism as the inevitable consequence of the abandonment of aestheticism.
This "brokenness" of the political world of representative democracy places an aesthetic political philosophy of democracy in the tradition of Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Tocqueville, and Schumpeter, by contrast to most of contemporary political philosophy. The aesthetic view enables us to develop a new and original account of the origins and nature of democracy, one that demonstrates how the present shortcomings of democracy can best be remedied to meet the challenges of the new century.
Table of Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: against ethics
- 1. Political representation: the aesthetic state
- 2. Stoa, aesthetics, and democracy
- 3. Romanticism, postmodernism, and democracy
- 4. Politics and irony
- 5. Politics and metaphor
- 6. Metaphor and paradox in Tocqueville's political writings
- Conclusion: democracy in the age of unintended consequences
- Notes
- Index.
by "Nielsen BookData"