The sublime ofthe Enquiry is a transcendent ordering authority without which the pleasurable sympathies and“mutual compliance” of social life would degenerate into an entropic state of vapid imitation andrepetition. 25, not just between governors and governed, aristocrats and commons, priest and parishioner, butbetween employer and employee, husbands and wives, parents and children. “Letter to John Jebb, September 10, 1785.” In Works of John Adams, vol. Releasing the passions leads to despotism. The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy. It is also indispensable for understanding Burke’s political views; as Stephen K. White has written, “Burke’s aesthetic reflections are crucial to a full understanding of his political conceptions.” The sublime, according to Burke, is the manifestation of the passion of raw astonishment, frenzied ecstasy, and zeal; it is large, and oftentimes terrorizing. In his Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs Burkeclaimed that he consistently proclaimed and acted upon a single principle in his many years inpublic life, which he described as a commitment to an “orderly and social freedom” (A 71). We would do well to reflect with Burke on where we find ourselves in today’s political climate that celebrates force, violence, and zeal as the cornerstone of virtue. This pleasure in beginning anew appears throughout many of Burke’s antirevolutionarywritings. On the Sublime and Beautiful. The possibility of complete immersion into the grandeur and grandiosity of “delightful horror” and excessive pain shocked Burke to his core. His reflections on the American crisis is one filled with a spirit of love because he recognized Americans as Englishmen, “First the people of the Colonies are descendants of Englishmen…The Colonists emigrated from you, when this part of your character was most predominate; and they took this bias and direction the moment they parted from your hands. It has a pedigree and illustrious ancestors. Such objects and instances, Burke writes, “areincapable of giving any delight whatsoever, and are simply terrible.” However, “at certaindistances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful” (1998, 86). Paul Guyer. Burke’scritics in the 1790s speak with surprising unanimity against the central role aesthetics play inBurke’s account of political life. However,alongside this important cluster of issues raised by Burke’s text wan another that has receivedless attention from political theorists. There is a criticalengagement with deism in the Enquiry where Burke explicitly associates the sublime with anidea of powerful divinity defined by its inaccessibility to human reason. Burke. As Don Herzog writes, for 7, Burke this meant that “politics extends far past King, parliament, and the like. 1984. Authority is not abstractly lodged in the state’s formal legal institutions, butinterwoven in the subjective experiences of daily life that produce and sustain those institutions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Blakemore, Steven. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Kramnick, Isaac. A world that is merely beautiful is, for Burke, a dangerously disenchanted worldsubject to human plan, use, and the calculations of instrumental reason. That terrifying reality was what Charles Dickens brilliantly satirized concerning the new Lady of Revolutionary Rebirth, “Liberty, equality, fraternity or death; – the last, much the easiest to bestow O Guillotine!” The Americans wanted to build up the ancient liberties of the English way. Critique of Instrumental Reason. “We have given to the frame of polity the image of a relation in blood, binding upthe constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties; adopting our fundamental lawsinto the bosom of our family affections…, keeping inseparable and cherishing with the warmthof all their combined and mutually reflected charities our state, our hearths, our sepulchers, andour altars” (R 30). The passion that Burke identifies with the sublime is first and foremost “astonishment,”by which he means a shocking or disruptive incapacitation of reason. The turn to Burke’s political aesthetics has history on its side, because it was the aestheticdimensions of Burke’s political thinking that some of his most insightful and influentialcontemporaries—both admirers and critics—emphasized in their encounters with his work,particularly his antirevolutionary writings. “Whenever the wisdom of our Creatorintended that we should be affected with any thing, he did not confide the execution of his designto the languid and precarious operation of our reason,” Burke writes, “but he endowed it withpowers and properties that…captivate the soul before the understanding is ready either to joinwith them or to oppose them” (1998, 142). It wascaptivation by metaphor (Paine 1989b, 135). 1989. 11, writes that “some degree of novelty must be one of the materials of every instrument whichworks upon the mind; and curiosity blends itself more or less with all our passions” (1998, 80).In the Enquiry “habit and custom are constantly presented as eroding the liveliness of thesensations we had in the morning of our days…when the whole man was awake in every part,and the gloss of novelty fresh upon all the objects that surrounded us” (Eagleton 1989). 1980. White describes this as the “humanization of the sublime,” in that “the object ofsublime experience is increasingly associated with feats of human subjectivity…Human beingsthemselves now produce a sort of human infinite that displaces what had before stood for theinfinite, God, or fate” (White 1994, 75). New York: Columbia University Press, 199-250.Herzog, Don. “Whenauthors and critics talk about the sublime,” Paine writes, “they see not how nearly it borders onthe ridiculous. “Delightful Horror”: Edmund Burke and the Aesthetics of Democratic Revolution Jason Frank Associate Professor Government Department Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853 T: 607-255-6759 F: 607-255-4530 [email protected] DRAFT: Please to not cite or circulate beyond workshop audience. While C.B.Macpherson once easily dismissed Burke’s aesthetics as “of little theoretical interest,” some 2, Burke scholars argue that his aesthetics provide “a unifying element of Burke’s social andpolitical outlook,” giving “a degree of coherence and system to the welter of words which hebequeathed to mankind” (Macpherson 1980, 19; Wood 1964, 42). They are given shapethrough molecular authoritative relations that are themselves importantly aesthetic. Burke’s public in these texts is usually construed as a theatrical 17, audience (Melvin 1975), and they clearly exemplify Burke’s “dramatic theory of politics”(Hindson 1988). Theradical democratic sublime and the pleasure it takes in beginning anew is for Burke associatedwith the drama of the clean slate, the “spirited and daring” but also “shameless” enterprise ofdemocracy itself. 9, Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 538-543.Ashfield, Andrew, and Peter De Bolla, eds. …But lest any ill use should afterwards arise, let the crown at the conclusion of the ceremony be demolished, and scattered among the people whose right it is (Paine 1989a, 28). Two of Burke’s radical critics—Mary Wollstonecraftand Thomas Paine—wrote books condemning Burke’s aestheticization of political life anddefending the French Revolution that have become canonical works of political theory in theirown right. 18, in his thinking, and criticized him for it, invoking, in effect, the earlier Burke’s aesthetics tocriticize the later Burke’s political analysis (see Blakemore 1997). “Rights of Man.” In Thomas Paine: Political Writings, ed. Paul Krause is a graduate student in philosophy writing a thesis on the political aesthetics of Edmund Burke and holds an M.A. 2007. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1-45.Paine, Thomas. Liberalism and Empire: Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Hindson, Paul. Price and other radicalslargely assumed the coherence of a pre-political collective identity called “the people”; Burkedid not. London: Allen & Unwin.De Tocqueville, Alexis. 2003. London: Penguin.Eagleton, Terry. Grube. Its secondary effects are“admiration, reverence, and respect” (1998, 101). The Burke-Wollstonecraft Debate: Savagery, Civilization, and Democracy. The radicals, Burke wrote, sought to“divest men of all love for their country,” not to set it on firmer principles. 28, There is a discomforting similarity between the aesthetic appreciation of the FrenchRevolution and its pleasure of beginning and Burke’s earlier aesthetics of the sublime. Durham: Duke University Press.Furniss, Tom. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.Burke, Edmund. 1, Out of the tomb of murdered monarchy in France has arisen a vast tremendous unformed specter, in a far more terrific guise than any which ever yet has overpowered the imagination and subdued the fortitude of man. Burke’s concern with the radical democratic sublimeenacted by the Revolution bears a discomforting similarity to central elements of his own earlieraesthetics, which was itself quite revolutionary in the central emphasis Burke placed on the1. Some tears might be drawn from me, if such a spectacle were exhibited on the stage.” He also notes of the revolution, “the French Revolution is the most astonishing that has hitherto happened in the world…[e]verything seems out of nature in this strange chaos of levity and ferocity, and of all sorts of crimes jumbled together with all sorts of follies. Does the ceremony actuate the entity it sets out to commemorate? 19, Burke dedicates large sections of the Reflections to contesting Price’s radical Lockeaninterpretation of the constitutional settlement of 1688 (Pocock 1987, xi), arguing that 1688 wasan extension of the principles animating the ancient constitution, not a mark of its abrupt popularrupture.

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