In his essay on the work of art, Benjamin approaches the phenomenon of the aestheticization of politics, to which, in his own words, communism must respond with the politicization of art. In this paper I will focus on this problem, and I will examine the hypothesis that the diagnosis of a "aestheticization" is not exclusive, in the framework of Benjamin's philosophy, of the field of art and its relation to politics. I will argue that this problem is also rooted in history in the form of an aestheticization of the past, to which Benjamin, above all in the thesis "On the concept of history", proposes to respond with the politicization of history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]