All our current instruments agree that we are working in the wake of an “aesthetic ideology” that is less a fixed set of beliefs than a set of malleable assumptions deriving from Kant and then from Romanticism about what works of art make available for society. But that very malleability makes it very difficult to get the kind of handle on the past which will allow us to test the degree to which we can escape the hold of this ideology without losing an entire cultural heritage. In fact this malleability creates a condition in which that ideology continues to haunt those who would reject it, especially those who seek to build a new politics on notions of person, text, value, and community, since such notions tend to be covertly shaped either by that ideology directly or by problematic oppositions it generates. Therefore trying to work somewhat free of this ideology requires arguing on two fronts – against an oversimplified political dismissal of some fixed version of this aesthetic ideology and also against those theorists like Eagleton and Derrida who hope to correlate versions of post-modern politics with ideals recuperated directly from that ideology. My ultimate ambition is to elaborate alternative ways of providing a language of value for the arts, and hence for the ways that the arts contribute to social life. But before I take on that conceptual task I want to set the contemporary scene by rehearsing a narrative that I hope clarifies some of the basic underlying factors affecting our conceptual commitments.