In the past ten years, theorists from Elaine Scarry to Roger Scruton have devoted renewed attention to the aesthetic of beauty. Part of their discussions claim that beauty―because it arises from a sense of proportion, symmetry, or reciprocity―provides a model for justice.Justice, Dissent, and the Sublimemakes a significant departure from this mode of thinking.Mark Canuel argues that the emphasis on beauty unwittingly reinforces, in the name of justice, the constraints of uniformity and conventionality. He calls for a more flexible and inclusive connection between aesthetics and justice, one founded on the Kantian concept of the sublime. The sublime captures the roles that asymmetry, complaint, and disagreement play in a complete understanding of a just society―a point, the author maintains, that was appreciated by a number of Romantic writers, including Mary Shelley.Canuel draws interesting connections between the debate about beauty and justice and issues in cosmopolitanism, queer theory, and animal studies.