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Visions of Society

Aesthetic Democracy

Mihail Evans studies art to understand politics.

The work of Frank Ankersmit on representation and democracy is surprisingly little known even among academics working in political theory. At the end of the 1990s, already one of the most eminent figures globally in the philosophy of history, this professor at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands turned his attention from the problems of historical representation to the related one of political representation. He argues that many of the big problems faced by contemporary society can be best addressed if we look again at what happens in the process of representation and understand our societies as examples of what I call ‘aesthetic democracy’, and he prefers to name ‘aesthetic politics’.

Ankersmit published two important books on contemporary democracy: Aesthetic Politics: Political Philosophy Beyond Fact and Value (1997), and Political Representation (2002), but neither of these have ever attracted they attention they deserve, so I will outline something of the basics here.

Two pictures of Blenheim Palace.

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