Hannah Arendt’’s Aesthetic Politics: Freedom and the Beautiful

We face a crisis of public reason. Our quest for a politics that is free, moral and rational has, somehow, made it hard for us to move, to change our positions, to visit places and perspectives that are not our own, and to embrace reality. This book addresses this crisis with a model of public reason based in a new aesthetic reading of Hannah Arendt’s political theory. It begins by telling the story of Arendt’s engagement with the Augenblicke of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Jaspers, Heidegger, Kafka and Benjamin, in order to identify her own aesthetic Moment. Josefson then explicates this Moment, what he calls the freedom of the beautiful, as a third face of freedom on par with Arendt’s familiar freedoms of action and the life of the mind. He shows how this freedom, rooted in Jaspers’s phenomenology and a non-metaphysical reading of Kant, serves to redress the world-alienation that was a uniting theme across Arendt’s works. Ultimately, this volume aims to challenge orthodox accounts of Arendtian politics, presenting Arendt’s aesthetic politics as a radically new model of republicanism and as an alternative to political liberal, deliberative and agonistic models of public reason.

Jim Josefson is Associate Professor of Political Science at Bridgewater College, USA. His publications have appeared in Philosophy & Social Criticism, Party Politics and PS: Political Science & Politics. Josefson presents his reading of Arendt for a general audience in the Political Philosophy in The Moment: Narratives of Freedom from Plato to Arendt.