| Summary: | In this dissertation, I examine how certain twentieth- and twenty-first-century moral philosophers try to “make good on” how aesthetic education only partially delivers on what is taken to be its promise: to let each person become all that she is capable of being, to paraphrase Thomas Carlyle. Although Iris Murdoch, Martha Nussbaum, Cora Diamond, and Stanley Cavell, the four principal figures of this dissertation, are known for mounting strong, affirmative cases for aesthetic education, I argue that they in fact attempt to recuperate the perfectionist promise of aesthetic education, which is highly contested throughout the twentieth century, by making cases for imperfection. To do so, they all write on the figure who has become the central yet ambiguous subject of literary ethical inquiry in the Anglo-American academy, Henry James. James’s challenging place in their work arises from his own unsettling and exceptional responses to nineteenth-century conceptions of and beliefs in culture, as well as his early twentieth-century revival, which established him both as a cultural fixture and as a site wherein the means and ends of culture were contested, reconceived and rehabilitated. This thesis therefore begins by considering how Lionel Trilling, Isaiah Berlin, and Judith Shklar, three Cold-War Liberals widely believed to have deaccessioned perfectionism from the liberal tradition and who heavily influenced these philosophers, try to revise what perfectionism entails as they come to read James. In the following chapters, I consider how Murdoch, Nussbaum and Diamond, and Cavell, attempt to reckon with aesthetic education’s limits by respectively trying to secure the foundations of moral perfectionism, admitting as good that which contravenes it, and mourning its demise as they read works by James, namely <em>The Wings of the Dove</em>, <em>The Golden Bowl</em>, the Prefaces to the New York Edition, and ‘The Beast in the Jungle’.
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