64 POLITICAL AESTHETICS

abstract expressionism arises in certain very specific social/political/eco-

nomic circumstances, which obviously bear on its character. The very with-
drawal of art from the hurly-burly of political or economic power is itself a
political decision, one that could be made only under a certain specific set of
social circumstances, institutions, economy, and political practices. Refusal to
participate politically, or to use one’s art politically, or to allow one’s art to be
used politically, is a political decision. And indeed, the disengagement of such
works from the political is one reason why people like Hitler condemned
modernism as kitsch. So the question of whether “all art is political” is an
ambiguous one.
I am definitely not promoting a program for the politicization of the
arts. On the one hand, if you want to paint pictures of George Bush as a
chimpanzee, or mushroom clouds, or Che, I say more power to you. I do
not condemn any art on the sheer grounds that it has political content. But
on the other hand, I am not demanding such content, and if you want to
sing about lost love, or paint monochromes, or throw useful pots without
considering very carefully the political context in which you’re working or
the location of your works within that context, I will not carp (probably).
As the art world of the last thirty years or more has shown, the obligation
to push justice forward with every little gesture is boring and of doubtful
efficacy. Certainly, as far as the program of political aesthetics is concerned,
there is no reason not to condemn art that is didactic, hectoring, repetitive, or
a sheer expression of ideology. Political aesthetics suggests that the political
is one important dimension of understanding in the arts (as it suggests that
the aesthetic is one important dimension of understanding in politics), but
by no means does it suggest that there are no other important dimensions.
And more importantly—or at least more to the point of this book—political
aesthetics suggests that the arts are a central aspect of all political life, but not
that they are the only aspect of political life. All art has a political context.
But not all art has a political message.

Political Dimensions of Aesthetic Values

Beauty
Asking whether a political system is beautiful might seem . . . precious.
What we want, we might say, is a political system that works, whatever that
might mean, rather than one that looks good not working, whatever that
might mean. Perhaps the French monarchy in the seventeenth and eigh-
teenth centuries was beautiful. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t have been
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overthrown and its principals publicly executed; and one feature of some seg-
ments of the French Revolution was an anti-aesthetic drawn from a critique
of the ancien régime. On the other hand, the beauty of political systems, such
as it is, serves many possible real functions. Take a High Renaissance, classical,
Palladian aesthetic of humanism, clarity, balance, and make a political system
by its standards: perhaps you’d get something like the American triune sys-
tem of checks and balances. That the overall shape of the American political
system is clear is—demonstrably, I think—the result of aesthetic attention
and understanding; it is quite self-consciously a style, saturated in classicism.
But it is also central to making the system comprehensible to the people who
operate under it or for that matter those who operate it, and in producing
and defining allegiance.
One of the most traditional definitions of “beauty,” and one of the most
plausible, given how hard a term it is to define, is that beauty is unity in
variety. Trying to cash this out will embroil you in a thousand amazing and
interminable arguments, but this could be at least a useful way to start to
think about the formal elements in painting, for example, or what distin-
guishes absorbing from irritating drama. Francis Hutcheson wrote, “What
we call Beautiful in Objects, to speak in the Mathematical Style, seems to be
in a compound Ratio of Uniformity and Variety; so that where the Unifor-
mity of Bodys is equal, the Beauty is as the Variety; and where the Variety is
equal, the Beauty is as the Uniformity” (Hutcheson, p. 29). This is obviously
not particularly precise or clear, even though it seems more precise and clear
than some definitions of this notoriously indefinable term. But it is striking
that it represents the coordination problems faced by an artist in a way that
might just as well apply to the purposes of political systems: coordination of
disparate elements into some sort of unified whole. In this, politics responds
to our need to belong, or is an expression of that need, and an inspiring poli-
tics places the citizen in the context of a well-arranged whole, or makes the
identities of the parts flow from the character of the whole. Indeed Aristotle,
considering the question of the proper size of the state, says, “Beauty is real-
ized in number and magnitude, and the state which combines magnitude
with good order must necessarily be most beautiful” (Aristotle, 1326a33–35)
and hence best.
In this regard one might think of the function of the term “democracy,”
which is used both in a wide variety of senses and with regard to a wide
variety of objects. In John Dewey’s philosophy, for example, “democracy”
becomes a term for the way a culture conducts its inquiries or generates
knowledge: Dewey connects democracy with science, which is, ideally, open
to criticism from any quarter, which requires freedom of expression to find
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truth, or uses freedom to find truth. His educational theories flow directly
from what a democracy requires of its citizens, and how democratic institu-
tions treat people (students in this case). Every aspect of Dewey’s desired social
transformation flows from this ideal: from economic and political policies
and institutions to the way paintings ought to be displayed (à la the Barnes
Foundation of Philadelphia). So the system is unified in a single concept,
more or less. But the concept itself is, in Dewey’s hands, supposed to encour-
age variety in lifestyles and opinions. Dewey’s democracy is a pluralistic
politics, but that variety is created by the application of a single principle:
Democracy is belief in the ability of human experience to generate the
aims and methods by which further experience will grow in ordered
richness. Every other form of moral and social faith rests upon the idea
that experience must be subjected at some point or other to some
form of external control; to some “authority” alleged to exist outside
the processes of experience. Democracy is the faith that the process of
experience is more important than any special result attained, so that
special results achieved are of ultimate value only as they are used to
enrich and order the ongoing process. Since the process of experience
is capable of being educative, faith in democracy is all one with faith in
experience and education. . . .
Democracy as compared with other ways of life is the sole way of
living which believes wholeheartedly in the process of experience as
end and as means; as that which is capable of generating the science
which is the sole dependable authority for the direction of further
experience. (Dewey 2, p.232)
Dewey’s characterization of art will connect it directly to democracy, and
hence also to education and science:
Wherever perception has not been blunted and perverted, there is an
inevitable tendency to arrange events and objects with reference to the
demands of complete and unified experience. Form is a character of
every experience that is an experience. Art in its specific sense enacts
more deliberately and fully the conditions that effect this unity. Form
may then be defined as the operation of forces that carry the experi-
ence of an event, object, scene, and situation to its own integral fulfill-
ment. (Dewey 1, p. 137)
It is interesting that Dewey uses the notion of “form” here. For one thing,
he is rejecting the idea of form that one finds in such “formalists” as Clive
Bell: form for Dewey is the shape of the real world in experience, or the ways
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the real world is shaped in interaction with an organism. Then the question
of political form is also a question of the aesthetic, of the features that unify
experiences and persons into coherent wholes. Dewey’s philosophy is an
extreme application of the identity of politics and art (though there are also
some fairly vaguely enunciated differentiations), but it is far from a precious
aestheticization of politics; if anything it is a plea to regard art itself as a matter
of life and death, freedom and totalitarianism, knowledge and ignorance. In
its unified variety, Dewey’s is a beautiful democratic politics.
Dewey is not a utopian; he is a meliorist: democracy is preferable as a
system that develops openly over time. But we could think of utopias as
political visions of beauty. This would be a profitable angle from which to
understand Plato’s Republic, for instance, with its nested tripartite divisions
of individual soul, polis, and universe. It’s an amazing achievement, a beauti-
ful design. That is of course not to say that it’s true, and indeed its beauty
might be a seriously problematic aspect of it, because it attracts adherents, as
it attracted the interlocutors in the Republic, to what is, in the final analysis,
a totalitarian vision. One might say it is too beautiful to be true, or rather
that its particular variety of beauty—temporally frozen, for one thing—is
incompatible with truth (ironically, since that is exactly what Plato takes
as the mark of truth). Beauty is always, among other things, seduction, and
in deploying its aesthetic, a vision of beauty can be seductive epistemically,
ethically, politically. And many people have actually been seduced by beauty
into doing evil. This is surely one way to understand the arts in fascism. But
it does not mean that beauty is dispensable in politics. We have never seen
a politics that dispenses with it entirely, and we would not want to; it would
ignore, in its basic configuration, a primary source of allegiance, satisfaction,
and understanding.
Of course there are many approaches to the idea of beauty, but even the
most subjective or affective have political ramifications. I myself have defined
beauty, vaguely enough, as “the object of longing” (Sartwell 3), and here again
we might think of the utopian tradition as the attempt to make a beautiful
political system, a politics that is a worthy object of longing. Politics traffics
in transformation. It is always promising to satisfy one’s longings, whether
for autonomy or belonging, for cash or power or security or identity. And
though I have tended to emphasize the “scientific” aesthetic standards—
simplicity, scope, and clarity, for example—there are beautiful things that do
not display these qualities, and even systems for understanding beauty that
deploy the opposite standards. For certain purposes in certain cultures a state
might be hyper-baroque, romantic, Byzantine, mannerist, and so on, and it
has been a real attack on liberal republicanism that its state and nation are