This volume brings together new essays from distinguished scholars in a variety of disciplines—philosophy, history, literary studies, art history—to explore various ways in which aesthetics, politics and the arts interact with one another. Together the essays demonstrate the need to counteract the reductionist view of the relationship between politics and the arts that prevails in different ways in both philosophy and critical theory. They suggest that the irreducibility of the aesthetic must prompt us to reconceive the political as it relates to human cultural activity.