ABSTRACT
Aesthetic value includes the worth of cultural goods and activities. Orthodox aesthetics is, in part, concerned with the principles that ground the ascription of value to particular works of art. While aesthetics may not itself be concerned with valuing particular works of art (which is more properly the task of art criticism), the attention that it gives to art, and especially the cultural products consumed by the dominant classes within society (not least, European society since the eighteenth century) presupposes that they are valuable objects and activities, and that there is such a thing as aesthetic value. At the end of the eighteenth century, Kant’s Critique of Judgement (1987) is significant for proposing and defending a distinction between the pleasure that is derived from beauty (and thus art) and the mere sensuous enjoyment of useful, non-art objects (such as food). The autonomy and distinctiveness of aesthetic value has been increasingly challenged. On the one hand, politically, links have been drawn between art and ideology. The aesthetically valued art of the dominant class is explained by reference to the role it plays in legitimating and propagating the political and moral values of the dominant class. On the other hand, aesthetic value may be linked to economic value. It may be argued that the prime purpose of aesthetics is not to ascribe the ultimately illusionary aesthetic value to objects, but to give that which is otherwise of minimal use an economic value. Aesthetically valued objects can be traded at high prices (Bourdieu 1984)
The development of sociology as a discipline may be seen to centre on the empirical study of values, not least in Emile Durkheim’s conception of ‘moral facts’ (1982). The integration and stability of a society is seen to depend upon the internalisation of the consensual values of the society (encapsulated in Durkheim’s concept of the ‘conscience collective’), through the process of socialisation. Functionalism, as the dominant American approach to sociology up to the 1960s, presupposed a consensus on moral values as a precondition of a stable society. This presupposition was increasingly challenged by the sociology of deviance, with the recognition of a wide-range of alternative subcultures, with markedly divergent value systems, within a single society. Similarly, the reemergence of Marxism as a significant force within sociology in the 1960s, led to an increased recognition that consensual values were themselves the
products of political and above all ideological and hegemonic practices, as conflicting groups sought to defend, promote and negotiate conflicting values systems. The work of Michel Foucault (1971), on punishment (1977) and sexuality (1981)) served to restore to sociology Nietzschean perspectives on the power struggles that underpin value systems, and in which values are inculcated.
