ABSTRACT
The concept of aesthetic autonomy was political in its genesis and continued to be so as it evolved over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We see the first articulation of the idea of aesthetic autonomy in the works of the Third Early of Shaftesbury, who maintained that disinterested aesthetic contemplation would serve as a means of distancing elites from their own self-interest, and that the cultivation of an aesthetics would therefore create the type of citizen needed for liberal democracy. Shaftesbury sought to employ aesthetic autonomy as a means of devolving power away from a sovereign. His theories were taken up by figures as diverse as Addison and Steele, Schiller, and Matthew Arnold.
