Thesis (Ph.D.)--McMaster University, 2004. / Advisor: D. L. Coleman. Also available via World Wide Web.

This study focuses on the rhetorical and political conditions for answering the question 'what is kulturpolitik?'. The most common translation of kulturpolitik is 'cultural policy', but 'cultural politics' is an alternative - perhaps policies must al­ways involve broader notions of politics. Here, politics is understood as struggles and conflicts in community, struggles that take place between rules and practical cases, between law and freedom. It is argued that language is a key to an awareness of political conditions, although politics also might involve aesthetics and violence. According to Aristode and Ricoeur, language is something that occurs 'when somebody says something to somebody about something' - and, as added in the dissertation: 'for a certain purpose and in a certain manner'. The general conditions for saying what kulturpolitik is, can thus be studied with reference to the interplay between six aspects: author; utterance, audience, reference, purpose and manner These rhetorical aspects can be used differendy in different cases. Four particular cases are examined in the dissertation. These are chosen pardy because they allow a gen­eral overview of the connections between politics and the arts, or policy and cul­ture, mainly in Western Europe; and pardy because they allow a demonstration of the importance of rhetoric. The cases are: (1) a comparison between two major Government Bills to the Swedish Parliament, concerning the general formulation of state cultural policy; (2) an analysis of the meaning of goals in policy, with particular reference to the Council of Europe's evaluations of cultural policies in France, Sweden, Austria, the Netherlands, and Finland; (3) an overview of the political uses of the concept of culture in Germany between 1800 and 1932; (4) a study of the French state's effort to engage the arts in the service of the republic between 1789 and 1983. It is, furthermore, argued that a rhetorical 'manner' can be understood as a way of employing the faculty of judgement. Following Aristode and Kant, and es­pecially according to Arendt and Lyotard, it is shown that judgement is a pre- eminendy political faculty. It allows those who use language - authors as well as audiences — to reflect upon the conditions of agreement in the absence of precon­ceived rules, but with the help of aesthetical awareness and imagination. / Digitalisering@umu