What are the limits of rational politics? Our political science takes for granted the ability for rationality to dominate in its prescriptions, but politics, it seems, resists rational control. The most musical philosophers, Plato and Rousseau, have long recognized that politics has a certain musical character: by engaging and educating the passions, politics has a certain charming, song-like quality that resists the dominance of rationality. Music has long been a highly significant subject for writers of political thought, and it is only in today’s age that politics and the arts seem to occupy entirely different spheres. We will investigate how music exposes the limits of public reason.