In this presentation I want to explore the possibility that there is a worthwhile model of political judgment in Kant’s account of the ways we talk — or better, “quarrel” — about beauty. While a coupling of political and aesthetic theory initially appears as rather odd bedfellows, a line of thinkers including Hannah Arendt has found the intellectual resources and reflective framework or the political philosophy which Kant never wrote in the aesthetics of the Critique of Judgment. In an overlooked passaged of that “third Critique”, Kant suggests that there is a specifiable domain of rational discourse appropriate for aesthetic judgments. Kant calls this particular kind of communicative act “streiten”, which is fairly translated as “quarreling”; but the words “streiten” and “Streit” also connote a fight in the sense of a heated argument or even a brawl — the kind of thing to which one resorts when rational, discursive, and diplomatic procedures to resolve a dispute come up short but when the issue at hand is too important to remain unsettled. Unlike the anomie of a free-for-all, however, Kant clearly wants to distinguish streiten from the brute imposition of superior force. In other words, Kant intends the Streit to operate within a distinctively normative arena. The question is whether marking out the normative space in which aesthetic quarrels take place provides any insight into the conditions and possibilities of political discourse.