ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the reception of the enlarged mentality in the specific domain of political theory. The various types of sociability assumed by the politicization of sensus communis are presented across a spectrum from the substantive community of shared meaning and understanding, to the purely formal notion of shared human capacities without any substance. Interpretations of Kant's Critique of Judgment vary in accordance with their reading of the central notion of sensus communis. Critics who equate aesthetics with the modelling of the world in line with a vision of the beautiful or sublime miss the potential of the lack of criteria characterizing Kantian aesthetic judgement; that is, its reflective nature. The emphasis placed by contemporary materialists on the role of the world in the composition of norms points the way to a reflective form of measurement and subsumption.
