Aesthetic Politics: Political Philosophy Beyond Fact and Value (Ankersmit F. R.)(Paperback)

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. In a representative democracy, this aesthetic gap appears in the fact that the representative is not a mandatary but a delegate of the voter (possessing a certain
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