Political Aesthetics (review)

John Adams' vision of the American political system, with its division of powers into three branches, is inseparable from the classical aesthetic value of balance (52). The commitment to the scientific and epistemological principle of Ockam's razor hinges on aesthetic values of simplicity, coherence, and beauty, not on any pure judgment of reason (56-58). Marcus Garvey's Black Nationalism movement forged a sense of national identity out of romantic aesthetic representations of a people (153-157). These are among the various ways in which Crispin Sartwell exemplifies the grounding judgment of this book: "all politics is aesthetic" (1). As the book moves between elaborate case studies of political philosophies, movements, and systems, and theoretical studies of core concepts, Sartwell aims to take this motivating idea beyond the gloss that all political ideas and values have aesthetic dimensions to challenge the inseparability of political values from aesthetic ones.

In substantiating his position, Sartwell turns more than once to Kant's third and last work of critical philosophy, the Critique of Judgment, where Sartwell emphasizes that Kant allows to both aesthetics and, correlatively, the faculty of the imagination, a form of thought that exceeds and expands concepts arrived at through the use of reason (2, 50-51). I emphasize this, as it seems to me that Kant's third critique deserves recognition as a crucial inspiration for work, already written and yet to come, that explores the intersection of aesthetics and politics. In Sartwell's engagement with it, this Kantian idea comes to take the form of the conviction that political ideas and values are necessarily marked by such an aesthetic expansion, or, as he often puts it, by an "orthogonal relationship" with aesthetic values (11, 48, 81). While we often seek to understand these political ideas and values in a way that aims to isolate reason from aesthetic sensibility, we must engage with our aesthetic sensibilities if they are to be grasped in fullness.

The book is full of both interesting and helpful illuminations of the aesthetic depths of many political values often approached in a way that leaves these depths in darkness. Whether in each case Sartwell illustrates that such values simply could not be what they are without these aesthetic entailments, or whether they are somewhat superficial, is sure to be a topic for reflection and discussion among readers. Here, I will say that I found Sartwell's discussion of the aesthetic nature of epistemological values particularly effective in suggesting that our reason, rather than standing alone, is affected and informed by our aesthetic tastes (see especially 50-59). This reach of the aesthetic into the epistemic is doubly important for Sartwell as he wants to insist that an aestheticized politics yields richer criteria by which to evaluate the truth of certain political ideas, rather than stripping truth claims of their value (54).

Yet while the claim that all politics is aesthetic becomes much more meaningful the deeper down the aesthetic dimensions of political ideas and values are said to sink, it also becomes the more controversial and potentially problematic. For instance, we might consider the opening chapter of the book, a case study of the political aesthetics of Nazi Germany. In this chapter, Sartwell argues that the aesthetics of Nazi Germany is an idiosyncratic "romantic classicism" that, among other things, sets up both the German nation and an idealized Aryan body as the repository for classical universal values, such as purity and order (16). Beyond this, Sartwell argues that its politics takes its most cohesive form in its aesthetics; for Sartwell, aesthetic values such as order and purity and a desire to "[l]iterally reshape the world" are at the core of Nazi German politics (16,19). In this respect, Nazi Germany is what Sartwell calls an "artpolitical system" (18). An adequate political response to Nazi Germany, for Sartwell, thus requires an address to its aesthetics principles. Such an aesthetic response is all the more requisite insofar as Sartwell argues that certain art works of the Nazi era, in particular Leni Riefenstahl...