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Palgrave Macmillan

Hannah Arendt’s Aesthetic Politics

Freedom and the Beautiful

  • Book
  • © 2019

Overview

Authors:
  1. Jim Josefson

    1. Department of Political Science, Bridgewater College, Bridgewater, USA

    View author publications

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  • Presents a unique and unorthodox analysis of Hannah Arendt's politics

  • Offers a new reading of Arendt’s theory of judgment, suggesting that her non-metaphysical reading of Kant is wholly defensible

  • Appeals to scholars not just in political theory, but also in law, history, philosophy, sociology, education, literary criticism, and anthropology

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Table of contents (7 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-ix
    Download chapter PDF

  2. Introduction

    • Jim Josefson
    Pages 1-17

  3. The Moment

    • Jim Josefson
    Pages 19-69

  4. The Beautiful

    • Jim Josefson
    Pages 71-124

  5. Judgment

    • Jim Josefson
    Pages 125-158

  6. Spirit

    • Jim Josefson
    Pages 159-187

  7. Res publica

    • Jim Josefson
    Pages 189-245

  8. Conversations

    • Jim Josefson
    Pages 247-282

  9. Back Matter

    Pages 283-307
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Keywords

About this book

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. 

 

Reviews

“Jim Josefson’s book is remarkably well written, clearly with an eye on ‘the beautiful’: its style is vivid, free of jargon, yet at the same time sophisticated in the manner of the best Anglophone literature, unassuming but effective. He takes us through his elaboration of the Arendt inspired new politics with ease and confidence. And the main idea is not only original but also very pertinent to our times.” (Agata Bielik-Robson, Professor, Jewish Studies, University of Nottingham, UK)


Authors and Affiliations

  • Department of Political Science, Bridgewater College, Bridgewater, USA

    Jim Josefson

About the author

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.

Bibliographic Information

  • Book Title: Hannah Arendt’s Aesthetic Politics

  • Book Subtitle: Freedom and the Beautiful

  • Authors: Jim Josefson

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18692-0

  • Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham

  • eBook Packages: Political Science and International Studies, Political Science and International Studies (R0)

  • Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG, part of Springer Nature 2019

  • Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-18691-3Published: 07 June 2019

  • Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-18694-4Published: 14 August 2020

  • eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-18692-0Published: 27 May 2019

  • Edition Number: 1

  • Number of Pages: IX, 307

  • Number of Illustrations: 4 b/w illustrations

  • Topics: Political Theory, Political Philosophy, Aesthetics

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