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Crispin Sartwell. Political Aesthetics. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 2010. 270 pp.
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,...