Sensing the Nation’s Law. Historical Inquiries into the Aesthetics of Democratic Legitimacy

We are said to live in an age of democratic legitimacy. The rightfulness of a political and legal order is meant to reside in a widespread belief in the rightfulness of democracy. Contemporary democratic legitimacy is tied, among other things, to consent, to representation, to the identity of ruler and ruled, and, of course, to legality and the legal forms through which democracy is structured. The nation, its unity, and whatever democratic legitimacy its form of rule enjoys, become tangible and emerge as much in shared taste, in the pre-supposition and generation of aesthetic con-sensus, as in the formation or execution of a common will or the inculcation or reasoning of a common reason. This introduction presents the ten chapters of the edited volume, each of which engages with the intersection of aesthetics and law, and, more specifically with the question of how the nation— and its (fundamental) law—are ‘sensed’ by way of various aesthetic forms.