Seeing Things Politically - An Inaugural Lecture

What does it mean to see things politically? Many (including previous holders of this Professorship) have suggested that in order to interpret politics realistically, one needs to understand its practical and experiential limits, both past and present.

In this lecture, I want to think about what is involved in trying to see those limits in the first place, and whether it is possible today to salvage certain ways of seeing politics and its limits drawn from art history in particular. For while metaphors of ‘vision’ have been crucial to the historical interpretation of political ideas over the last century, and while there has been no shortage of critique of ‘high modernist’ forms of politics, there has been relatively little engagement by historians of political (and economic) ideas with art history about how to see what the limits to politics as a particular kind of predicament, might be. In fact, while some art historians proclaimed the end of modernism after the fall of the Berlin Wall, this lecture asks whether interpreting some of the most pressing contemporary limits to politics, might best be pursued by returning to certain modernist ways of seeing things politically.

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Host or Publisher Department of Politics and International Studies, Cambridge University