ABSTRACT
This chapter looks closely at the work of the political philosopher, pamphleteer, and Whig Member of Parliament Edmund Burke, whose aesthetic treatise A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, published anonymously in 1757, has had a massive and lasting impact on discussion of the sublime. The fact that Burke's meditations are frequently couched in sexual terms, lends an intriguingly sensuous aspect to the treatment of self-preservation and society. Some thirty years after the completion of the Enquiry, Burke extended the terms of his aesthetic analysis to the domain of politics. The event that prompted this renewed enquiry was the French Revolution, inaugurated by the fall of the Bastille in Paris on 14 July 1789. The idea of beauty, therefore, is used as a strategic counter to assist Burke's readers to make the crucial distinction between the false, or revolutionary sublime and its true, constitutional, counterpart.
