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The Sublime, the Beautiful, and the Political in Burke’s Work

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The Science of Sensibility: Reading Burke's Philosophical Enquiry

Abstract

Following on his O’Neill’s earlier work on Wollstonecraft’s political rereading of Burke, O’Neill now details Burke’s own rereading and appropriation of some tenets that are visible in the Philosophical Enquiry in his later work. He shows that the Enquiry already encapsulates views on the role of power, e.g., in interpersonal relationships and institutions, which can be seen to have political import. In other works of this period, such as the English History and the Account, Burke merged political and aesthetic aspects in his analyses. Finally, in the Reflections, and in his arguments in defence of empire, these two strands of his thought are explicitly brought in relation to each other. Here, Burke appropriated the categories of the sublime and the beautiful that he had developed decades before in the Enquiry, in order to refashion them for explicitly political goals.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 2nd ed. (1759), ed. James T. Boulton (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), henceforth abbreviated PE.

  2. 2.

    The first attempt to relate Burke’s aesthetic and political thought was Neal Wood, “The Aesthetic Dimension of Burke’s Political Thought,” Journal of British Studies 4, no. 1 (1964): 41–64. An important early statement is found in Isaac Kramnick, The Rage of Edmund Burke: Portrait of An Ambivalent Conservative (New York: Basic Books, 1977). More recently, see esp. Linda M. G. Zerilli’s excellent Signifying Woman: Culture and Chaos in Rousseau, Burke, and Mill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); and Stephen K. White, Edmund Burke: Modernity, Politics, and Aesthetics (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1994). Iain Hampsher-Monk, “Rhetoric and Opinion in the Politics of Edmund Burke,” History of Political Thought 9, no. 3 (1988): 455–484, discusses Burke’s aesthetics in conjunction with the Classical rhetorical tradition. Recent years have seen an explosion of work on Burke from the perspective of literary criticism. See Luke Gibbons, Edmund Burke and Ireland: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Colonial Sublime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Frans De Bruyn, The Literary Genres of Edmund Burke: The Political Uses of Literary Form (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution, 1789–1820 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983); Steven Blakemore, Burke and the Fall of Language: The French Revolution as Linguistic Event (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1988); Terry Eagleton, “Aesthetics and Politics in Edmund Burke,” History Workshop 28 (1989): 53–62. Unfortunately, in Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology: Language, Gender, and Political Economy in Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), Tom Furniss attempts to read Burke through an unsatisfying admixture of Marx and Derrida, buttressed by the largely esoteric intra-disciplinary jargon currently fashionable in some English departments, which often occludes as much as it clarifies.

  3. 3.

    See White, Edmund Burke, p. 5.

  4. 4.

    See Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla, eds., The Sublime: A Reader in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 2.

  5. 5.

    For examples, see Kennan Ferguson, The Politics of Judgment: Aesthetics, Identity, and Political Theory (Lanham: Lexington, 1999); Morton Schoolman, Reason and Horror: Critical Theory, Democracy, and Aesthetic Individuality (London: Routledge, 2001); Jacques Ranciére, The Politics of Aesthetics (London: Continuum, 2006); Davide Panagia, The Poetics of Political Thinking (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); Frank Ankersmit, Aesthetic Politics: Political Philosophy Beyond Fact and Value (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).

  6. 6.

    PE ii.v.64–70.

  7. 7.

    PE ii.v.64.

  8. 8.

    PE i.vii.39. On the centrality of terror for Burke’s theory of the sublime, see esp. Samuel H. Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1935), 84–100; see also Vanessa L. Ryan, “The Physiological Sublime: Burke’s Critique of Reason,” Journal of the History of Ideas 62, no. 2 (2001): 265–279.

  9. 9.

    PE ii.v.65.

  10. 10.

    PE ii.i–ii.57–58, 64.

  11. 11.

    PE iii.ix.110.

  12. 12.

    PE iii.ix.110–111.

  13. 13.

    PE iii.xxvii.124.

  14. 14.

    PE ii.v.64–67.

  15. 15.

    PE iii.xiii.113.

  16. 16.

    PE iii.i.92.

  17. 17.

    PE iii.ix.110.

  18. 18.

    PE iii.xviii.117–120.

  19. 19.

    See, e.g., Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1988); and Susan Moller Okin, Women in Western Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).

  20. 20.

    PE ii.v.67–68.

  21. 21.

    See Heinrich Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Claude Lefort, “The Permanence of the Theologico-Political?,” in Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 213–55.

  22. 22.

    See Daniel I. O’Neill, The Burke-Wollstonecraft Debate: Savagery, Civilization, and Democracy (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2007).

  23. 23.

    For exceptions, see F. P. Lock, Edmund Burke, 2 vols., vol. I, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998, 2006), 141–64; C. P. Courtney, Montesquieu and Burke (Oxford: Blackwell, 1963). See also T. O. McLoughlin, “Edmund Burke’s Abridgment of the English History,” Eighteenth-Century Ireland 5 (1990): 45–59; Michel Fuchs, Edmund Burke, Ireland, and the fashioning of the self (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1996), ch. 7.

  24. 24.

    See Lock, Edmund Burke, vol. I, p. 164.

  25. 25.

    The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, vol. I, (8 vols. to date, Oxford, 1981–), 349, hereafter abbreviated WS.

  26. 26.

    WS i.358–359. These included the Jewish priesthood, the Persian Magi, the Indian Brahmins, and the Roman priesthood.

  27. 27.

    WS i.368.

  28. 28.

    WS i.383–384.

  29. 29.

    WS i.385, 390.

  30. 30.

    WS i.392–393; quoted at p. 392.

  31. 31.

    WS i.393, 398, 400.

  32. 32.

    WS i.404–405.

  33. 33.

    On this point, see Lock, Edmund Burke, vol. I, p. 155.

  34. 34.

    WS i.443.

  35. 35.

    WS i.453.

  36. 36.

    WS i.454.

  37. 37.

    WS i.456, 431.

  38. 38.

    WS i.431.

  39. 39.

    PE ii.i.50, 57. See McLoughlin and Boulton’s comment at WS i.431, fn 5; and Lock, Edmund Burke, vol. I, 154–155.

  40. 40.

    Edmund and Will Burke, An Account of the European Settlements in America, 2 vols. (London, 1757; reprint, New York, 1972).

  41. 41.

    On this point, see Lock, Edmund Burke, esp. p. 136.

  42. 42.

    Burke’s publisher, Dodsley, paid 50 lb for the copyright, the receipt for which, dated 5 January 1757, was signed by Edmund Burke. See Lock, Edmund Burke, vol. I, p. 125.

  43. 43.

    In addition to Lock, see also, Carl B. Cone, Burke and the Nature of Politics: The Age of the American Revolution (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1957), 28–30.

  44. 44.

    See Lock, Edmund Burke, vol. I, pp. 127, 130.

  45. 45.

    Lock, Edmund Burke, vol. I, p. 127. For important treatments of the Account, see Gibbons, Edmund Burke and Ireland, and Fuchs, Edmund Burke, Ireland, and the fashioning of the self, ch. 4, as well as Lock. All three of these scholars rightly connect the Burkes’ argument in the Account to the Scottish Enlightenment.

  46. 46.

    On this point, see Lock, Edmund Burke, vol. I, p. 136. Of this section, Lock concludes: ‘Given the different outlooks of Edmund and Will, the one philosophical, the other preoccupied with economic exploitation, it can confidently be ascribed to Edmund’ (p. 136).

  47. 47.

    An Account of the European Settlements in America, vol. I, pp.167–168.

  48. 48.

    See Lock, Edmund Burke, vol. I, pp. 137–138.

  49. 49.

    Account, vol. I, pp. 173–174

  50. 50.

    Account, vol. I, pp. 196–198.

  51. 51.

    Account, vol. I, pp. 198, 201.

  52. 52.

    On this specific connection, see Gibbons, Edmund Burke and Ireland, pp. 204–6. On the general theme, see Zerilli, Signifying Woman, ch. 4: ‘The Furies of Hell’: Woman in Burke’s “French Revolution”, pp. 60–94.

  53. 53.

    Account, vol. I, pp. 199–200.

  54. 54.

    Account, vol. I, pp. 175–176.

  55. 55.

    Lock, Edmund Burke, vol. I, p. 133.

  56. 56.

    Account, vol. II, pp. 128–129.

  57. 57.

    Account, vol. I, pp. 285–286.

  58. 58.

    Account, vol. I, p. 241.

  59. 59.

    Account, vol. I, p. 279.

  60. 60.

    Account, vol. I, p. 285.

  61. 61.

    Account, vol. II, pp. 127–128.

  62. 62.

    Account, vol. II, pp. 129–130.

  63. 63.

    The online Oxford English Dictionary defines an ‘eye-servant,’ in part, as ‘one who does his duty only when under the eye of his master or employer.’ For a fuller discussion of these themes in Burke’s writings on empire, see Daniel I. O’Neill and Margaret Kohn, “A Tale of Two Indias: Burke and Mill on Empire and Slavery in the West Indies and America,” Political Theory 34, no. 2 (2006): 192–228.

  64. 64.

    The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, vol. III, (London, 1872), 82, 85; hereafter, Works.

  65. 65.

    Works iii.85, 87.

  66. 66.

    WS viii.127–129.

  67. 67.

    WS viii.129.

  68. 68.

    WS viii.127.

  69. 69.

    WS viii.128.

  70. 70.

    WS viii.131. On the language of ‘nature’ in Burke, see James T. Boulton, The Language of Politics in the Age of Wilkes and Burke (London: Routledge, 1963), ch. 7.

  71. 71.

    WS viii.131–132; emphasis added.

  72. 72.

    WS viii.84.

  73. 73.

     On this point, see Frans De Bruyn, “Edmund Burke’s Natural Aristocrat: The ‘Man of Taste’ as a Political Ideal,” Eighteenth-Century Life 11, no. 2 (1987): 41–60; see also Rodney W. Kilcup, “Reason and the Basis of Morality in Burke,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 17, no. 3 (1979): 271–84, and “Burke’s Historicism,” Journal of Modern History 49 (September 1977): 394–410.

  74. 74.

     WS viii.115.

  75. 75.

     WS viii.125.

  76. 76.

     WS viii.126.

  77. 77.

     On this theme, see J. G. A. Pocock’s “Introduction” to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), xxxii–xxxiii; “The Political Economy of Burke’s Analysis of the French Revolution,” in Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 197–98; and “Edmund Burke and the Redefinition of Enthusiasm: The Context as Counter-Revolution,” in The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, vol. 3, ed. Franςois Furet and Mona Ozouf (Oxford, 1989), 31–32.

  78. 78.

     Burke, W & S, vol. VIII, p. 127. On this point, consider Burke’s reply to his sometime friend and intellectual foil, Philip Francis, who informed Burke that, in his opinion, everything that he had written about the queen was ‘pure foppery.’ In a wounded response that presaged the end of their friendship, Burke implored Francis: ‘Is it absurd in me, to think that the Chivalrous Spirit which dictated a veneration for Women of condition and of Beauty, without any consideration whatsoever of enjoying them, was the great Source of those manners which have been the Pride and ornament of Europe for so many ages?…I tell you again that the recollection of the manner in which I saw the Queen of France in the year 1774 [actually 1773] and the contrast between that brilliancy, Splendor, and beauty, with the prostrate Homage of a Nation to her, compared with the abominable Scene of 1789 which I was describing did draw Tears from me and wetted my Paper. These Tears came again into my Eyes almost as often as I looked at the description. They may again. You do not believe this fact, or that these are my real feelings, but that the whole is affected, or as you express it, ‘downright Foppery’. My friend, I tell you it is truth – and that it is true, and will be true, when you and I are no more, and will exist as long as men – with their Natural feelings exist.’ See The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, 10 vols., ed. Thomas W. Copeland, vol. VI, 20 Feb. 1790, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958–1978), 88–92, quoted at 90–91. For Francis’s letter, see pp. 85–87.

  79. 79.

     PE i.xv.44–46.

  80. 80.

     WS viii.173, 137–38.

  81. 81.

     WS viii.111.

  82. 82.

     WS viii.143. Here I am very much in agreement with Donald Winch, Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750–1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 186.

  83. 83.

     My reading of this portion of Burke’s argument, in its emphasis on the connection between sublimity and consecration, shares a great deal in common with William Corlett’s acutely attuned rendering of these passages in Community Without Unity: A Politics of Derridian Extravagance (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989), 131–35. I agree wholeheartedly with Corlett’s formulation of a ‘Positive/Negative Fear Distinction’ in Burke, and his assertion that democracy most assuredly constitutes the negative side of that dichotomy.

  84. 84.

     WS viii.144.

  85. 85.

     WS viii.145–46.

  86. 86.

     WS viii.97.

  87. 87.

     WS viii.146.

  88. 88.

     WS viii.147.

  89. 89.

     WS viii.149.

  90. 90.

     WS viii.146.

  91. 91.

     WS viii.319.

  92. 92.

     WS viii.462–63.

  93. 93.

    For a further elaboration of this argument, see The Burke-Wollstonecraft Debate, Chapter 6.

  94. 94.

     WS viii.97–98.

  95. 95.

     WS iii.281–82. On these themes, see O’Neill and Kohn, ‘A Tale of Two Indias: Burke and Mill on Empire and Slavery in the West Indies and America,’ for which I wrote all the material on Burke.

  96. 96.

     See Daniel I. O’Neill, “Rethinking Burke and India,” History of Political Thought 30, no. 3 (2009): 492–523.

  97. 97.

     See esp. Lock, Edmund Burke, Vol. II, pp. 161–76, and Vol. I, pp. 529–30. See also Marshall’s outstanding discussion of the similarities between Burke’s view of Europe and his understanding of India, as set forth in his editorial introductions to Volumes V–VII of WS, and his “Burke and India,” in The Enduring Edmund Burke (Wilmington: University of Delaware Press, 1997), 39–47. See also Frederick G. Whelan’s illuminating essay, “Burke, India, and Orientalism,” in An Imaginative Whig: Reassessing the Life and Thought of Edmund Burke, ed. Ian Crowe (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005), 127–57; and Regina Janes, “At Home Abroad: Edmund Burke in India,” Bulletin of Research in the Humanities 82, no. 2 (1979): 160–74. Compare these arguments with Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); and Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), in particular.

  98. 98.

     For Lock’s specific claim that, for Burke, India was ‘another Europe,’ see Edmund Burke, vol. II, pp. 164, 173.

  99. 99.

     See Daniel I. O’Neill, “Burke, Ireland, and the Political Theory of Empire” (Paper presented at the 2008 American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Boston). My view can be contrasted with Edmund Burke and Ireland, where Gibbons argues that his book ‘can be seen as complementing Mehta’s focus on India by integrating Burke’s aesthetics and his Irish background more fully into [his] searching critiques of colonialism’ (p. xii).

  100. 100.

     McDowell also edited the volume of Burke’s Writings & Speeches on Ireland.

  101. 101.

     WS ix.417–418.

  102. 102.

     WS ix.668.

  103. 103.

     WS ix.428.

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  1. Department of Political Science, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA

    Daniel I. O’Neill

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  1. , REHSEIS-SPHERE,, Centre National de la Recherche Scientif, rue Thomas Mann (building Condorcet) 5, Paris Cedex 13, 75205, France

    Koen Vermeir

  2. , Philosophy, Lenoir-Rhyne University, 7th St. NE 625, Hickory, 28603, USA

    Michael Funk Deckard

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O’Neill, D.I. (2012). The Sublime, the Beautiful, and the Political in Burke’s Work. In: Vermeir, K., Funk Deckard, M. (eds) The Science of Sensibility: Reading Burke's Philosophical Enquiry. International Archives of the History of Ideas / Archives internationales d'histoire des idées, vol 206. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2102-9_10

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