Delightful Horror

Abstract

Edmund Burke remains one of the great theorists of the aesthetic dimensions of political life, and this chapter focuses on his account of the sublime production of political authority. Burke’s theory of the sublime identifies an instinctive “delight” that human beings take in their own subordination: it is an affective device for naturalizing order and rank in human society and the psychological foundation of such distinctive Burkean formulations as “proud submission” and “dignified obedience.” However, the French Revolution, and its enthusiastic reception by British radicals during the 1790s, occasioned a revision of Burke’s political aesthetics, whereby the sublime was no longer associated with astonishment, novelty, and ennobling disorientation, but with the gravity of an historical inheritance transmitted across time by the ancient constitution. Burke’s antirevolutionary writings mark a transition in his thinking from a political aesthetics of sublime transcendence to one of historical immanence.