Abstract

From Plato and Aristotle, through Wolff and Kant and Smith, and up to the United States Supreme Court, it has been almost universally assumed that "order" is "beauty" and that an orderly society was a beautiful society. To realize such "beauty," two social-political systems have been proposed. One system is Adam Smith's rarely defended "commercial-state," which holds that lawful commerce produces a harmonious civil society of beauty, artfulness, opulence, and virtue. The other system is the widely defended aesthetic "police-state," which holds that beauty requires a State to prevent anarchy--understood here as aesthetic chaos and social disorder. The State must have the aesthetic-legal authority to impose order on to the "appearance" of expression in society and on to the underlying "structures" of society. Thus, the State has the authority to suppress non-conforming expression which challenges the desired order--be it political, economic, communications, or cultural. This is what I term the aesthetic-order doctrine. This doctrine sees beauty as an idealist extraphysical order imposed on to the world, a collective value requiring individual conformity to the whole, and necessarily requiring aesthetic authority for the State. It is argued here that this conception of beauty is unnatural and illogical, ultimately resulting not in beauty and diversity, but conformity and chaos. An alternative philosophy of beauty is presented here which sees beauty as purposeful proportionality, a relationally-objective value for individuals, underlying all of their normative judgments, and necessarily requiring the absolute right for all individuals to engage in voluntary judgment, consent, exchange, and relations in their pursuit of beauty. Beauty is found, not in order, but in universal principles of proportionality providing unlimited diversity. Because beauty requires voluntary judgment and an absence of coercion, it must exist outside the domain of the State. Beauty and freedom of expression must exist in anarchy--understood here as a system of law sanctioning, not State coercion and chaos, but the principles of voluntary judgment and the domain of individual sovereignty. Thus, not paradoxically, beauty requires anarchy