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Books

On Beauty and Being Just by Elaine Scarry

Peter Benson applauds a beautiful book on beauty by Elaine Scarry.

In 1998, Elaine Scarry, a professor of aesthetics at Harvard University, was invited to give the prestigious Tanner Lectures on Human Values. (Previous lecturers have included Michel Foucault and John Rawls.) This short, incisive, intelligent book is based on her lectures.

She chose as her topic beauty, well aware that it is an unfashionable subject to discuss. “Over the last several decades,” she notes, “many people have either actively advocated a taboo on beauty or passively omitted it from their vocabulary, even when thinking and writing about beautiful objects such as paintings and poems.

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