''The Aesthetic Contract'' is a work of

intellectual history Intellectual history (also the history of ideas) is the study of the history of human thought and of intellectuals, people who conceptualize, discuss, write about, and concern themselves with ideas. The investigative premise of intellectual histor ...

and

critical theory A critical theory is any approach to social philosophy that focuses on society and culture to reveal, critique and challenge power structures. With roots in sociology and literary criticism, it argues that social problems stem more from soci ...

Yale Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wor ...

professor

Henry Sussman Henry Sussman (born 1947 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is an American literary scholar who was a visiting professor of German at Yale University. His research interests focus on European-American 19th and 20th-century comparative literary studies ...

, first published in 1997 by

Stanford University Press Stanford University Press (SUP) is the publishing house of Stanford University. It is one of the oldest academic presses in the United States and the first university press to be established on the West Coast. It was among the presses officially ...

Synopsis

In the book Sussman traces intellectual enterprise, art, and artistic conventions since what he calls the "broader modernity" (marked by the end of the Medieval period in Europe) and suggests that art and its conventions have essentially become a secular institution that have essentially replaced the moral allegiances the subject owed to the Church before the reformation increasing a sense of personal freedom.

Reception

Critical reception for ''The Aesthetic Contract'' has been positive. In a review in ''

The Comparatist ''The Comparatist'' is an American literary journal published annually since 1977 by thSociety for Comparative Literature and the Artsthat publishes articles on the topic of comparative literature. Its current editor-in-chief is Zahi Zalloua (Whi ...

'' David Halliburton wrote "In sum, ''The Aesthetic Contract'' is a strong, broad comparative study of major patterns in the modernity of the West from the time of the Protestant Reformation to our own, soon-to-expire, century." A reviewer for ''

Studies in Romanticism ''Studies in Romanticism'' is a journal of English Literature and Romanticism launched in 1961. It is a quarterly journal, published by Johns Hopkins University Press for Boston University Boston University (BU) is a private research univer ...

'' praised Sussman for the book's "steadfast refusal to sacrifice a genuine intellectual undertaking for such efficacity". Academic

Geoffrey Galt Harpham Geoffrey Galt Harpham (born 1946) is an American academic who until recently served as president and director of the National Humanities Center. One of the characteristics of his tenure was the encouragement of dialogue between the humanities on th ...

was more mixed in his review, as he wrote that the "rhetoric of terror notwithstanding, ''The Aesthetic Contract'' displays perhaps an excessive ease, an unresisted 'liberty, while also stating "Can any such set of understandings or conventions as general as the ones Sussman imagines be conjured in terms that would be both useful and suggestive? Perhaps not. But the effort to bring into being, by sheer force of discourse, a shadowy but defining--what do we call it?--commands a certain respect; and the very incompleteness of the project may yet provoke further efforts, by Sussman and others."

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Aesthetic Contract, The Critical theory 1997 non-fiction books Stanford University Press books