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disagree, I may try to convince you, but there are no sanctions at my
disposal to force adoption of my views. Given these conditions,
aesthetic judgments require considerable courage. Had I just offered
a judgment of taste and said that I like this painting instead of saying
that it is beautiful, I could have saved time and effort in discussing
the matter with you and trying to convince you. But, had I not tried
to convince you, I could not have argued on behalf of values re–
sponding to needs rather than wishes. Only in arguing for an
aesthetic judgment can critics and critical theorists issue an invita–
tion to share values credited with responding to needs rather than
wishes. Judgments of taste do not argue on behalf of such values. Of
course, when Kant, Schiller, Lukacs or other critical theorists of–
fered aesthetic judgments, they did not have the power to enforce
their judgments. Their courage in offering such judgments rather
than judgments of taste deserves our admiration. Two additional
circumstances brought about the change from admiration to con–
demnation. The first can be traced to Lukacs and the second to our
history since Schiller wrote in the late eighteenth century.
Class consciousness, according to
History and Class Conscious–
ness,
is not the empirical consciousness of members of a given social
class, rather it is the imputed consciousness ascribed to members of
that class; it is the consciousness they ought to have, given the situa–
tion of their class within society. Examination of their empirical con–
sciousness yields only an account of what they want: it does not coin–
cide with the class consciousness ascribed to them, because they are
alienated from their needs. The critical theorist establishes these
needs based on the role each class plays within society. The familiar
three steps of our master argument are in evidence. While Kant and
Schiller wrote about art works and aesthetic judgments, Lukacs
writes about social classes and their role in history. Certainly, this is
politicization of aesthetics.
There is an important difference between aesthetic judgments
and the politicization of aesthetics. Kant, Schiller, critics, and criti–
cal theorists were powerless to enforce their judgments. They may
have spoken with a universal voice and may have claimed that
all
reasonable persons ought to agree with them, but they spoke for a
minority. They repeated their claims in spite of disagreement by a
majority- a majority they knew they could not convince. We ad–
mire their courage for advancing their arguments in the face of cer–
tain failure. But if they had gotten power to enforce their claims
