Political Aesthetics

Karl Axelsson is Senior Lecturer in Aesthetics at Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden. He is the author of The Sublime: Precursors and British Eighteenth-Century Conceptions (Peter Lang, 2007) and co-editor of Beyond Autonomy in Eighteenth-Century British and German Aesthetics (Routledge, 2020). Axelsson is also the Swedish translator of the third Earl of Shaftesbury’s The Moralists, a Philosophical Rhapsody.

Political Aesthetics magnificently re-writes the history of early eighteenth century British aesthetic thought. For too long Addison and Shaftesbury’s aesthetic speculations have been read in massively distorting ways and contexts, essentially seeing these writings as pre-cursors to Kant. Axelsson demonstrates that they are both more interesting and strange: careful and detailed explorations in the moral and political sinews of aesthetic thought. This intervention will not only re-orient histories of aesthetics it will also provide a substantial basis for thinking the aesthetic in our own time.

• AcknowledgementsNote to the ReaderIntroductionRethinking a ProvenanceReading the History of AestheticsAddison and the Body PoliticShaftesbury, Affections, and SocietyPart I: Addison, Taste, and the Moral Body Politic1.1 The Displacement of Political Authority1.2 The Disposition of Taste1.3 Aurelia and Fulvia1.4 Ethico-Emotive Pleasures1.5 Faith and Political Enthusiasm1.6 Britain and the New Classicism1.7 The Perils of the ForeignPart II: Moved by Affections: Shaftesbury on Beauty and Society2.1 Natural Affections2.2 Self-Knowledge and Disinterestedness2.3 A Disinterested (Aesthetic) Perception2.4 The Work of Art as a Whole2.5 Taste for SocietyCoda: Reading Addison and Shaftesbury in the FutureBibliographyIndex