Search results for ""author f. r. ankersmit""

This book fully recognizes the aestheticism inherent in historical writing while acknowledging its claim to satisfy the demands of rational and scientific inquiry. Focusing on the notion of representation and on the necessity of distinguishing between representation and description, it 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. The author shows that historical representation is essentially aesthetic, though its adequacy can be discussed rationally. He defines the criteria for representational adequacy, and examines the relationship between these criteria and value judgments. He also investigates the historicist conception of historical writing and the notions of identity and narrativity. This investigation takes place against the backdrop of the ideas of four of the most influential contemporary historical theorists: Erich Auerbach, Arthur Danto, Hayden White, and Jörn Rüsen. The book aims to identify and to explore for historical theory the juste milieu between the extravagances of the literary approach to historical writing and the narrow-mindedness of empiricists. The search for this juste milieu leads to a rationalist aesthetics of historical writing, a position that repeats both the aesthetic dimension of all historical writing and the criteria defining the rationality of the discipline of history.

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This ambitious work aims to reintroduce history into political theory. Contemporary political philosophy—liberalism, communitarianism, and republicanism—disregards history because it is irrelevant to the nature of politics and to what constitutes a political problem. The author argues that this view reduces politics and political philosophy to a vapid academic game that is insensitive to both the essence and practice of politics. He proposes that an indissoluble link between history and politics lies in the notion of representation. Since history represents the past, and the core of democratic politics resides in political representation, the author sees representation as the common ground of history and politics. He welcomes, analyzes, and elaborates all the aestheticist connotations of representation. The history of Machiavellianism demonstrates how influential the impact of history has been on political thought, ironically resulting in the repression of history from philosophical reflection on the nature of politics. Historicist political philosophy is distinguished from its anti-historicist rival in terms of the distinction between historicist compromise and anti-historicist consensus, as seen in the work of Rawls and Rorty. Compromise is shown to be politically creative and open-minded, whereas consensus is conservative and totalitarian. Finally, the author argues that respect is the supreme democratic virtue, and that historicist political philosophy respects “respect,” while its anti-historicist rival has no rivals between disrespect and indifference.

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This book fully recognizes the aestheticism inherent in historical writing while acknowledging its claim to satisfy the demands of rational and scientific inquiry. Focusing on the notion of representation and on the necessity of distinguishing between representation and description, it 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. The author shows that historical representation is essentially aesthetic, though its adequacy can be discussed rationally. He defines the criteria for representational adequacy, and examines the relationship between these criteria and value judgments. He also investigates the historicist conception of historical writing and the notions of identity and narrativity. This investigation takes place against the backdrop of the ideas of four of the most influential contemporary historical theorists: Erich Auerbach, Arthur Danto, Hayden White, and Jörn Rüsen. The book aims to identify and to explore for historical theory the juste milieu between the extravagances of the literary approach to historical writing and the narrow-mindedness of empiricists. The search for this juste milieu leads to a rationalist aesthetics of historical writing, a position that repeats both the aesthetic dimension of all historical writing and the criteria defining the rationality of the discipline of history.

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Taking as its point of departure a sharp critique of Rawls's influential A Theory of Justice—which, like most Western political philosophy since the seventeenth century, considers ethics to be foundational to a proper understanding of the political—this book looks at politics from an aesthetic perspective. To achieve this, it focuses on the notion of political "representation" as the heart of parliamentary democracy, openly welcoming and embracing all the aestheticist connotations of the term. Representation will always present us with an "aesthetic gap" between the represented and the representation; it is in this aesthetic gap that legitimate political power and all political creativity originate. In a representative democracy, this aesthetic gap appears in the fact that the representative is not a mandatary but a delegate of the voter (possessing a certain autonomy with regard to the voter, much in the same way that a painting has a certain autonomy vis-à-vis what it depicts). This was made clear by Burke more than two centuries ago and has been the practice of well-functioning representative democracies to the present day. The author sees totalitarianism as the inevitable consequence of the abandonment of aestheticism. This "brokenness" of the political world of representative democracy places an aesthetic political philosophy of democracy in the tradition of Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Tocqueville, and Schumpeter, by contrast to most of contemporary political philosophy. The aesthetic view enables us to develop a new and original account of the origins and nature of democracy, one that demonstrates how the present shortcomings of democracy can best be remedied to meet the challenges of the new century.

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