ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the role of enlarged thought in political theory by looking back to its initial formulation in Kant's Critique of Judgement. The enlarged mentality plays a key role in constituting the grounds for subjective universality. Appropriation of the enlarged mentality is far from straightforward, however, for two reasons. Firstly, the concept is muddied by a tension in Kant's work between his methodological commitments and his substantive anthropological observations. Secondly, a number of critiques leveled at the Critique of Judgement give us reason for caution in adopting it for political theory. Anthropological allusions diminish both the methodological purity and the universality of the critical philosophy, and the Third Critique thereby presents a challenge to Kant's whole critical project. The distinction between matter and form is regularly criticized from the perspective of philosophical aesthetics, even by scholars who do not identify an ideological component to the Third Critique.
