Abstract

The central claim of Monique Roelofs’s wide-ranging examination of the aesthetic is that it “hold[s] out the promise of a shared culture... people and objects [connected] in flourishing collective and material bonds”. Roelofs acknowledges Kant’s and Hume’s commitment to shared human faculties that allow judgements of taste “to attain intersubjective validity”; but her argument quickly develops from this “promise” to one with social and political consequences—of a harmonious and egalitarian society—and to radically different theoretical formulations and conclusions. Roelofs then also starts from a now familiar “everyday aesthetics” position—although it is not explicitly...