ACREMAN - Political theory and the enlarged mentality.

In this book, Stephen Acreman follows the development and reception of a hitherto under-analyzed concept central to modern and postmodern political theory: the Kantian ein erweiterte Denkungsart, or enlarged mentality.

While the enlarged mentality plays a major role in a number of key texts underpinning contemporary democratic theory, including works by Arendt, Gadamer, Habermas, and Lyotard, this is the first in-depth study of the concept encompassing and bringing together its full range of expressions. A number of attempts to place the enlarged mentality at the service of particular idealsthe politics of empathy, of consensus, of agonistic contest, or of moral righteousnessare challenged and redirected. In its exploration of the enlarged mentality, the book asks what it means to assume a properly political stance, and, in giving as the answer facing reality together, it uncovers a political theory attentive to the facts and events that concern us, and uniquely well suited to the ecological politics of our time.

Stephen Acreman is a Teaching Fellow at the University of Nottingham, Malaysia and a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Otago, New Zealand. Stephen received his Ph.D. in Political Theory from Monash University, Australia. His research interests are in the history of political and social thought, with a focus on political ecology.

Routledge Advances in Democratic Theory

Edited by David Chandler and Paulina Tambakaki (both University of Westminster)

Advisory Board: Benjamin Barber (City University of New York), Rajeev Bhargava (Centre for the Study of Developing Societies), Bhikhu Parekh (House of Lords), Fred Dallmayr (University of Notre Dame), John Keane (University of Sydney), Chantal Mouffe (University of Westminster).

Democracy is being re-thought almost everywhere today: with the widespread questioning of the rationalist assumptions of classical liberalism, and the implications this has for representational competition; with the Arab Spring, destabilizing many assumptions about the geographic spread of democracy; with the deficits of democracy apparent in the Euro-zone crisis, especially as it affects Greece and Italy; with democracy increasingly understand as a process of social empowerment and equalization, blurring the lines of division between formal and informal spheres; and with growing demands for democracy to be reformulated to include the needs of those currently marginalized or even to include the representation of non-human forms of life with whom we share our planet.

Routledge Advances in Democratic Theory publishes state of the art theoretical reflection on the problems and prospects of democratic theory when many of the traditional categories and concepts are being reworked and rethought in our globalized and complex times.

The series is published in cooperation with the Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster, London, UK

1. Nations and Democracy

New Theoretical Perspectives

Amanda Machin

2. Reclaiming Democracy

Judgment, Responsibility and the Right to Politics

Edited by Albena Azmanova and Mihaela Mihai

3. Performing Citizenship

Social Movements across the Globe

Edited by Inbal Ofer and Tamar Groves

4. Constrained Elitism and Contemporary Democratic Theory

Timothy Kersey

5. Democracy and Justice

Reading Derrida in Istanbul

Agnes Czajka

6. Negativity and Democracy in the Critical Theory Tradition

Dialectics from Karl Marx to Open Marxism

Vasilis Grollios

7. Political Theory and the Enlarged Mentality

Stephen Acreman

An original and compelling interpretation of Kants enlarged mentality in which the world and not the other unsettles pre-given conceptual understandings and demands that we face reality together. Attentive to how publics gather around things that resist convention and to the pressing need for differently situated stories to ensure that the force of things is felt and accounted for, Acreman offers what is most urgently needed for our age: political theory that is earthbound.

Bruce Braun, University of Minnesota

Political Theory and the Enlarged Mentality

Stephen Acreman

First published 2018

by Routledge

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

and by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2018 Taylor & Francis

The right of Stephen Acreman to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

A catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN: 978-1-138-66738-9 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-61892-0 (ebk)

This book studies the origin and reception of a central concept in modern and postmodern political thought: the Kantian ein erweiterte Denkungsart, or enlarged mentality. The enlarged mentality is a key element of Immanuel Kants philosophy of aesthetic judgement, given its fullest treatment in his Critique of Judgement. Therein, Kant wrestles with a curious feature that emerges when a person assigns the label beautiful to a particular thing. In this scenario, the aesthetic judge makes an autonomous judgement of beauty, since the aesthetic nature of the judgement precludes any appeal to non-aesthetic criteria such as usefulness, while at the same time asserting a claim that he or she believes others ought to assent tothe generalized this is beautiful, not the hyper-subjective this is beautiful, to me. There must, therefore, be some kind of broad-mindedness involved in the aesthetic judgement, such that the claim of beauty attains a general (albeit not universal) validity.

The prima facie appeal of the enlarged mentality for normative political theory is not difficult to ascertain. It provides a conceptual space in which to explore the balance between autonomy and responsibility in political judgement, and helps to define the specificity of the political in contrast to the merely prudential or the rigidly objective. Whatever the broad-mindedness that Kant deduces as necessarily present in the judgement of beauty turns out to be, it seems to match certain ideas that many people have about politics as it ought to be conductedwith an appeal for consent rather than a demand for obedience, and with the autonomy of the political actor and her presence in and for a community not acknowledged as a conflict but rather as two essential and enabling aspects.