Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Disinterestedness and denial of the particular: Locke, Adam Smith, and the subject of aesthetics
- 2 The beginnings of “aesthetics” and the Leibnizian conception of sensation
- 3 Of the scandal of taste: social privilege as nature in the aesthetic theories of Hume and Kant
- 4 Why did Kant call taste a “common sense”?
- 5 Art and money
- 6 “Art” as a weapon in cultural politics: rereading Schiller's Aesthetic Letters
- 7 Thinking about genius in the eighteenth century
- 8 Creation, aesthetics, market: origins of the modern concept of art
- Index
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Disinterestedness and denial of the particular: Locke, Adam Smith, and the subject of aesthetics
- 2 The beginnings of “aesthetics” and the Leibnizian conception of sensation
- 3 Of the scandal of taste: social privilege as nature in the aesthetic theories of Hume and Kant
- 4 Why did Kant call taste a “common sense”?
- 5 Art and money
- 6 “Art” as a weapon in cultural politics: rereading Schiller's Aesthetic Letters
- 7 Thinking about genius in the eighteenth century
- 8 Creation, aesthetics, market: origins of the modern concept of art
- Index
Summary
The opposition of “culture” to “nature” suggests the historical character of the former; if nature is that which is given, at least for the temporal span relevant to human experience, culture is that which is constructed, and so maintained, destroyed, or reconstructed by human action in time. And yet human beings have tended to discover in the practices and institutions of the particular modes of social life in which they find themselves universal features of their existence. In Western Europe, and the societies shaped under its influence, it is only during the last several hundred years that the idea has gained ground that history is marked by discontinuities as well as continuities and by the production of new phenomena of social life rather than a cycling through a set of constant alternatives.
No doubt this is in large part because these centuries have seen a social transformation not only profound, and affecting every area of social life, but also extremely rapid and marked by a continuous dynamism: the development of the capitalist mode of production. This was true in particular of the period of revolutionary change – in politics, economy, technology, and modes of thought – that made itself felt, even where its direct effects were limited, throughout Europe in the decades on either side of 1800.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993
- 1
- Cited by