Political Aesthetics: Addison and Shaftesbury on Taste, Morals and Society

Abstract

Karl Axelsson’s new book belongs to that stream of recent publications which strive to re-interpret and re-evaluate the pre-Kantian period of modern aesthetics. It also challenges and criticizes those, mostly Kantian, conceptions and teleological schemes of interpretation which have been elaborated in Alfred Baeumler’s and Ernst Cassirer’s seminal books of the 1920s and 1930s and applied even in the most recent modern history by Paul Guyer. Axelsson concentrates on two early eighteenth-century British authors of utmost importance, Joseph Addison and The Third Earl of Shaftesbury, who were contemporaries but, to my knowledge, never mentioned each other in their published writings. To various extent, both have been widely acknowledged as crucial figures of the nascent field of aesthetics, thus one can find the innovation of Axelsson’s enterprise not in the selection, but in his effort to re-consider their achievements under the catch phrase ‘political aesthetics’. His interpretative approach draws on Lawrence...