Aesthetic Politics ─ Political Philosphy Beyond Fact and Value

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.
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.

F. R. Ankersmit is Professor of History at the University of Groningen.