The concept that art must have no instrumental function is a doctrine traditionally traced back to Kant's Critique of Judgment. In Reconstituting the Body Politic, Jonathan Hess proposes that this concept of autonomous art marks not a withdrawal from the political realm but the ultimate embodiment of Enlightenment political culture, a response to a crisis in the institution idealized by Jurgen Habermas as the bourgeois public sphere. In Reconstituting the Body Politic, Hess explores the moment in late eighteenth-century Germany that witnessed the emergence of two concepts that marked the modern era: the political concept of the public sphere and the doctrine of aesthetic autonomy. By considering the extent to which, at its very inception, the concept of aesthetic autonomy is inextricably intertwined with the emergence of the concept of the public sphere, he offers both a historical study of the political conditions that produced this concept and a contribution to contemporary literary and political theory. Reading texts by Kant alongside the writings of contemporaries like Karl Philipp Moritz, Hess examines a wide variety of eighteenth-century texts, discourses, and institutions. He then enters into a critical dialogue with Walter Benjamin, Reinhart Koselleck, and Jurgen Habermas to articulate a political critique of this aesthetic. The aesthetic theory of Kant's Critique emerges not as a mere defense of the "disinterestedness" of aesthetic pleasure but as an engaged response to the political limitations of public culture during the Enlightenment. Hess argues for an understanding of these concepts as functionally interdependent, and he reflects on what this interdependence mightmean for the practice of literary and cultural criticism today. His work will interest not only Germanists and critical theorists but also art historians and historians of philosophy and political thought.

A compelling account of a controversial and innovative episode in sociological thought

An analytical account of the experiences of American soldiers in World War 1 drawing on a wide range of sources in France and the United States. Since American forces did not appear on the Western Front in substantial numbers until the summer of 1918, their experiences of the war were short and less devastating than those of their Allied comrades. Thus surviving American troops emerged from the experience in a rather more upbeat mood about the war than the Allies. This is a fascinating and ground-breaking work as few other military historians have attempted to deal with the US army of 1918 in depth.

Providing a gateway to a new history of modern aesthetics, this book challenges conventional views of how art's significance developed in society. The 18th century is often said to have involved a radical transformation in the concept of art: from the understanding that it has a practical purpose to the modern belief that it is intrinsically valuable. By exploring the ground between these notions of art's function, Karl Axelsson reveals how scholars of culture made taste, morals and a politically stable society integral to their claims about the experience of nature and art. Focusing on writings by two of the most prolific men of letters in the 18th century, Joseph Addison (1672–1719) and the third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713), Axelsson contests the conviction that modern aesthetic autonomy reoriented the criticism and philosophy originally prompted by these two key figures in the history of aesthetics. By re-examining the political relevance of Addison and Shaftesbury's theories of taste, Axelsson shows that first and foremost they sought to fortify a natural link between aesthetic experience and modern political society.

“This is an excellent study… a valuable asset for anyone teaching or studying political theory or political sociology.” Network "Mark Neocleous offers a contemporary understanding of the modern state through the unusual medium of its body, mind and personality, and through the space it occupies in the social world. It's a work that not only draws upon our existing imagination of the state, but also feeds it." Professor Robert Fine *What is the connection between Ronald Reagan's bottom and the King's head? *Why are weather maps profoundly ideological? *How do corporations get away with murder? *Who are the scum of the earth? In this book Mark Neocleous explores such questions through a critique of what he describes as the statist political imaginary. Unpicking this imaginary while also avoiding traditional approaches to state power, the book examines the way that the state has been imagined in terms traditionally associated with human subjectivity: body, mind, personality and home. Around these themes and through an engagement with the work of a diverse range of writers, Neocleous weaves a set of arguments concerning the three icons of the political imagination - the political collective, the sovereign agency and the enemy figure. From these arguments he draws out some telling connections between the role of the state in fabricating order, the social and juridical power of capital, and the relation between fascism and bourgeois ideology.

Why are some claims seen or heard as political claims, while others are not? Why are some people not seen or heard as political agents? And how does their political unintelligibility shape political bodies, and the terms of political agency, from which they are excluded? In this groundbreaking book, Sina Kramer uses the framework of constitutive exclusion to describe the phenomenon of internal exclusion -- exclusions that occur within a political body. More specifically, constitutive exclusions occur when a system of thought or a political body defines itself by excluding some difference (based on gender, race, class, sexuality, etc.) that is considered intolerable to the boundaries that comprise the body or system's political worth. This exclusion is not absolute, but preserves the very difference it seeks to repress in order to define itself against what it is not. Yet, as Kramer argues, if those who are excluded contest their repression, their political claims are deemed threatening and criminal. But can we ever be without constitutive exclusions? And can we avoid reinscribing them through critique? Kramer ultimately argues that to do justice to the excluded, to render those claims intelligible as political claims, instead requires the reconstitution of the political body on new terms. Importantly, this book offers both a diagnosis and a critique of the concept of constitutive exclusion, articulating what counts as a political action and who counts as a political agent. Kramer takes up a range of cases -- including those of Antigone, Claudette Colvin and Rosa Parks, the 1992 Los Angeles riots, and the Black Lives Matter movement -- to better understand who counts as a political actor, and how we understand political belonging and the contestation of exclusion. Excluded Within articulates who we are by virtue of who we exclude, and what claims we cannot see, hear, or understand.