ABSTRACT
Edmund Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful could be expected to receive at the most a bare mention in discussions of his political thought. Most of the Philosophical Enquiry is devoted to the detailed illustration of the various physical and psychological sources of the sublime and beautiful—terror, obscurity, vastness, smoothness, delicacy, sweetness, and so on. These qualities, as we shall see, find a place in the language and imagery of Burke's political writing. But even in the course of the Philosophical Enquiry itself Burke will occasionally afford them a political significance. In general Burke's aesthetic categories are rigidly, even mechanistically applied. It is his aim in the Philosophical Enquiry to determine what he calls "the logic of Taste". For taste is the social ratification of the individual aesthetic response; it carries with it a set of moral, social, and even political standards.
