Taking as its point of departure a sharp critique of Rawls's influential "A Theory of Justice," this book looks at politics from an aesthetic perspective.
Focusing on the notion of representation and on the necessity of distinguishing between representation and description, this book argues that the traditional semantic apparatus of meaning, truth, and reference that we use for description must be redefined if we are to understand properly the nature of historical writing.
This work aims to reintroduce history into political theory. Contemporary political philosophy - liberalism, communitarianism, and republicanism - disregards history as irrelevant to the nature of politics and to what constitutes a political problem.
Why are we interested in history at all? Why do we feel the need to distinguish between past and present? This book investigates how the notion of sublime historical experience complicates and challenges existing conceptions of language, truth, and knowledge.