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Aesthetic Liberalism: Beauty and Political Action in the Age of Interest

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Aesthetic Liberalism: Beauty and Political Action in the Age of Interest AESTHETIC LIBERALISM: BEAUTY AND POLITICAL ACTION IN THE AGE OF INTEREST A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Jin Gon Park August 2020 © 2020 Jin Gon Park AESTHETIC LIBERALISM: BEAUTY AND POLITICAL ACTION IN THE AGE OF INTEREST Jin Gon Park, Ph. D. Cornell University 2020 Throughout the nineteenth century, a number of major liberal thinkers incorporated aesthetic categories such as “beauty,” “sublimity,” “glory,” and “grandeur” into their sociopolitical thinking. Whereas their aesthetic languages are typically associated with either military imperialism or private aestheticism, I ask whether this moment in liberal history also offers a kind of political aesthetics that, by transcending this binary, can newly inform our debate about liberal democratic politics. Answering this question in the affirmative, my dissertation recovers from this period an aesthetic liberal political thought that is primarily rooted in an anxiety about economic liberalism’s implications for political action. I examine this idea of “aesthetic liberalism” in the writings of three key liberal thinkers in the nineteenth century in different national settings: Alexis de Tocqueville in France, John Stuart Mill in England, and Ralph Waldo Emerson in America. The animating claim of aesthetic liberalism is that beauty has more power to generate political virtues than rational arguments, which reflects the influence of romanticism’s critique of discursive rationality and valorization of imagination in the domain of moral transformation. While being, in varying degrees, committed to modern liberal economy, aesthetic liberals also desired to promote a public-minded political life similar to their own which were dedicated to either advancing liberties within an existing liberal democracy or establishing a liberal constitutional order itself. Opposing both political withdrawal and interest politics typical in liberal market society, all three theorists conceived beauty as a key promoter of a public-spirited political action. Each turns to historical exemplars of action such as the French revolutionaries of 1789 and the American abolitionists to educate the aesthetic sensibility of liberal citizens to embrace public-spirited action in their own lives. Biographical Sketch Jin Gon Park studies political theory, with a focus on the history of liberalism and issues of political action and political psychology. Jin Gon received his master’s and doctorate degrees from Cornell University. Before Cornell, he completed an undergraduate bachelor’s degree in history at Yale University in New Haven, CT. He was born and raised in Seoul, Republic of Korea. iii Acknowledgments At the beginning of my graduate program at Cornell University, for reasons I could not fully articulate at the time, I decided to change my subfield from comparative politics to political theory, though I had hardly any previous training in the latter. Despite the suddenness and seeming recklessness of this decision, everyone in Cornell’s Government Department always kindly supported my new, uncertain endeavor. For this, I will be forever grateful. At Cornell, I am indebted to so many people in so many ways that the following acknowledgments can only do partial justice. Thanks, first of all, to Alexander Livingston, for chairing the project and in every way being a great mentor and scholarly role model; Jason Frank, for opening my eyes to the aesthetic dimension of politics; Jill Frank, for allowing me to see Plato with a fresh perspective; Isaac Kramnick, for imparting the joy of studying the history of political thought; Jamila Michener, for enlightening me on racial and socioeconomic justice in America, and Begüm Adalet, for serving as my external reader. Thanks also to William Pennington, Michael Gorup, Vijay Phulwani, Kevin Duong, Nolan Bennett, Timothy Vasko, Jordan Jochim, Varun Sanadhya, Ed Quish, Jacob Swanson, Nazli Konya, Daniel Zimmer, Ani Chen, Erik Petrie, Inni Youh, Tessy Schlosser, Sarah Greenberg, William Cameron, David De Micheli, Whitney Taylor, Michael Allen, Katherine Welch, Caitlin Ambrozik, and Youyi Zhang for being wonderful colleagues and friends in the department. In addition, I want to thank Tina M. Slater who always guided me through an often-bewildering world of administrative work with great patience and kindness. Finally, I thank my family. Though separated by a great physical distance, we were always close to one another’s heart, and there is no way I could have made through the program iv without their constant love and faith in me. I hope that this dissertation and all my future works will be a source of pride for all of them. v Table of Contents Biographical Sketch iii Acknowledgments iv Introduction The Aesthetic Liberalism of Tocqueville, Mill, and Emerson 1 Chapter 1 Aesthetic Liberalism in the Age of Romanticism 18 Chapter 2 The Crisis of the Political and Tocqueville’s Poetry of the Revolution 49 Chapter 3 Mill’s Aesthetic Model of Deliberative Democracy 87 Chapter 4 A Moralist of Beauty in America: Emerson on the Cultivation of Public Virtue in Liberal Democracy 123 Conclusion Aesthetic Liberalism in the Age of Liberal Democracy 152 Bibliography 162 vi Introduction: The Aesthetic Liberalism of Tocqueville, Mill, and Emerson The recent aesthetic turn in political theory, involving diverse scholars, topics, and methodologies, is hardly a monolithic movement. Yet one generalization that can be made about the turn is that it addresses a set of modern political problems that have been largely neglected within contemporary liberal political philosophy. In The Aesthetic Turn in Political Thought, Nikolas Kompridis provides a helpful list of some of these problems: “the problem of voice and voicelessness, the problem of the new . the problem of judgement, the problem of responsiveness and receptivity . ”1 These issues of modern politics can be also considered aesthetic ones once the aesthetic is conceived very broadly to involve not only artistic categories like beauty and sublimity but also things such as sense perception and its intelligibility.2 But the aesthetic turn, even as it serves as a valuable corrective to contemporary liberal political theory’s restricted problem space, itself neglects an important political problem associated with liberal modernity. As a wide spectrum of canonical political theorists from Alexis de Tocqueville to Karl Marx observed, an enduring feature of liberal society is a widespread culture of materialistic egoism in which the individual regards promoting economic self-interest as the highest concern in life.3 While this attitude usually takes the form of preoccupation with money-making in the private sphere, it may also manifest in a political 1 Nikolas Kompridis, ed., The Aesthetic Turn in Political Thought (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), xix-xx. 2 Hence Kompridis calls the problems he lists as “the aesthetic problems of modern politics.” (Kompridis 2014, xix) 3 Although these critics used various vocabulary to explain how this commercial culture became predominant in Western society (Tocqueville’s “equality of conditions,” Mill’s progress in “civilization,” Marx’s liberal “rights of man,” etc.), their analyses at least implicitly attribute the change to certain elements of economic liberalism such as the right to private property and the destruction of feudal privileges in economy. In addition, in invoking the issue of materialistic egoism through these critics, I am not suggesting that it exhausts the cultural content of liberal civil society (which is implausible). Rather, I am conveying the idea that the modern structural changes in society based on economic liberalism led to a general spread of a commercial mindset which used to be mostly limited to the professional merchant class. 1 activity dominated by the concern for material self-interest. To a great degree, the aesthetic turn is theoretically informed by actual – historical and contemporary – examples of revolutionaries, activists, or popular protesters. Whereas these political actors are distinguished for their dedication to the promotion of public good in terms of freedom, equality, or justice, departing from interest politics typical in liberal society, the turn offers no specific idea on how such public-spirited political agents might be formed in the first place. In this, the aesthetic turn shares a common deficiency with contemporary liberal political thought it implicitly critiques. My dissertation addresses this shared shortcoming by providing a perspective on the political significance of the aesthetic different from that of the aesthetic turn. While finding its broad conception of the aesthetic plausible, I depart from the turn in presenting the aesthetic as a solution to – rather than a descriptive component of – a major political problem in modern society. Moreover, I do this by recovering the liberal political tradition’s own “aesthetic turn” in the nineteenth century centered on the artistic category of beauty. More specifically, in the writings of Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, I identify what I call “aesthetic liberalism” which conceives beauty as a key promoter of public-spirited political action in a context of depoliticization and the economization of politics. Meanwhile, my work on aesthetic liberalism is distinguished from the extant scholarship on the aesthetic dimension of liberalism. For instance,
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