ABSTRACT
Just after the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War, Immanuel Kant published his treatise On the Observation of the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime. This exposition of familiar eighteenth-century aesthetic categories offers an experiential foundation for his later thinking on ethics and indeed for liberal politics at large. Kant describes the antinomies of scale that structure modern Western perceptions of the social world: the intimate scale at which we encounter others face to face, and the grand, sublime scale that forces us to generalize or to ignore particulars, standing at a distance as we attempt to grasp the whole.
