BOOK ABSTRACT

In “Ideas for a Social Aesthetic”, Arnold Berleant suggests social life displays aesthetic characteristics when it involves, for example, “heightened perception, particularly sensuous qualities”; and, borrowing from Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man, he adds that such aesthetic social situations might also involve “the ability to harmonize the disparate qualities that, especially in Western culture, compete and conflict with each other” (e.g., the personal and the social, the embodied and the spiritual or cognitive). His pitch for a social aesthetic was made in the context of a collection on Aesthetics of Everyday Life (Light and Smith) where the central problematic was how and why one may want to expand aesthetic ways of knowing the world beyond the realm of art, to phenomena such as the weather, sport, food and urban life.

But how about the social sciences and their relationship to aesthetics? Here the picture is complicated by the fact that sociological-aesthetic manifestoes were part of the early- and pre-history of disciplines such as sociology (for e.g., the writings of Guyau or Simmel) but then receded. Traditionally, social scientists have also defined themselves as either separate from or in opposition to humanities approaches; and specific fields such as the sociology, psychology or anthropology of art have often overstated their differences with aesthetic approaches.

Yet recent decades have created something of an opening for rethinking how the social and the aesthetic relate to each other. Developments as varied as the “cultural turn” and the uncoupling of aesthetics from a philosophy of art, social scientists re-engaging with the topic of creativity and demonstrating a greater willingness to explore how aesthetic materials, objects and experiences are mobilized in social life, create a unique opportunity for reimagining social aesthetics. New and ongoing scholarship is also highlighting what the social sciences may owe to the Romantic worldview and to the aesthetic ideas swirling around different generations of social scientists; and authors are also posing questions about the “art of social theory” (Swedberg) and what method might look like if we see ethnography and fieldwork as encounters grounded in various kinds of sensuous experience.

The Routledge International Handbook of Social Aesthetics invites/will feature contributions from scholars and researchers interested in the social life-aesthetic nexus as a way of rethinking social science theory and method, academic knowledges and practices well beyond the so-called “ivory tower” (e.g., the role a social aesthetics might play in policy, applied research, community activity and conceptions of a life well-lived).