The history of aesthetics, like the histories of other sciences, may be treated in a two-fold manner: as the history of the men who created the field of study, or as the history of the questions that have been raised and resolved in the course of its pursuit. The earlier History of Aesthetics (3 volumes, 1960-68, English-language edition 1970-74) by the author of the present book was a history of men, of writers and artists who in centuries past have spoken up concerning beauty and art, form and crea tivity. The present book returns to the same subject, but treats it in a different way: as the history of aesthetic questions, concepts, theories. The matter of the two books, the previous and the present, is in part the same; but only in part: for the earlier book ended with the 17th century, while the present one brings the subject up to our own times. And from the 18th century to the 20th much happened in aesthetics; it was only in that period that aesthetics achieved recognition as a separate science, received a name of its own, and produced theories that early scholars and artists had never dreamed of.

When modern primary schools were first founded in Japan and Egypt in the 1870s, they did not teach art. Yet by the middle of the twentieth century, art education was a permanent part of Japanese and Egyptian primary schooling. Both countries taught music and drawing, and wartime Japan also taught calligraphy. Why did art education become a core feature of schooling in societies as distant as Japan and Egypt, and how is aesthetics entangled with nationalism, colonialism, and empire? Beauty in the Age of Empire is a global history of aesthetic education focused on how Western practices were adopted, transformed, and repurposed in Egypt and Japan. Raja Adal uncovers the emergence of aesthetic education in modern schools and its role in making a broad spectrum of ideologies from fascism to humanism attractive. With aesthetics, educators sought to enchant children with sounds and sights, using their ears and eyes to make ideologies into objects of desire. Spanning multiple languages and continents, and engaging with the histories of nationalism, art, education, and transnational exchanges, Beauty in the Age of Empire offers a strikingly original account of the rise of aesthetics in modern schools and the modern world. It shows that, while aesthetics is important to all societies, it was all the more important for those countries on the receiving end of Western expansion, which could not claim to be wealthier or more powerful than Western empires, only more beautiful.

Perhaps the most important aesthetics of the twentieth century appears here newly translated, in English that is for the first time faithful to the intricately demanding language of the original German. The culmination of a lifetime of aesthetic investigation, Aesthetic Theory is Theodor W. Adorno's magnum opus, the clarifying lens through which the whole of his work is best viewed, providing a framework within which his other major writings cohere.

The German philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–1762) introduced “aesthetics” as a new science in his Reflections on Poetry (1735) and developed this new part of philosophy in a series of later works, culminating in his unfinished Aesthetics (1750/1758). This volume is the first collection of essays in the English language devoted to Baumgarten’s aesthetics. The essays highlight the distinguishing features of Baumgarten’s aesthetics, situate it in its historical context, document its reception, and examine its contributions to contemporary philosophy.

This new study of eighteenth-century aesthetic theory situates it in theological contexts that are crucial to explaining why it arose.