Jan-Paul Sandmann

Jan-Paul Sandmann is a Ph.D. candidate in political theory at Harvard's Department of Government. By drawing on the thought of Thomas Mann—and placing his ideas in conversation with alternatives developed by Theodor W. Adorno, Susan Sontag, Richard Rorty, and Arthur Danto—his work explores questions about the role of art in society. In his dissertation, The Promise of Art and Its Crisis, he argues that Mann develops an aesthetic of ambivalence and irony that seeks to channel longings for meaning into the kind of sensibility liberal politics requires. The dissertation subjects Mann's humanistic liberalism to scrutiny and asks whether it continues to hold appeal today. In the course of doing so, it investigates what the promise of art consists in, how even pessimistic cultural criticism might serve as a resource for liberal politics, what significance the idea of art's end bears on the present, and how a position like Mann's might speak to a media environment radically different from his own.