Aesthetic Liberalism: Beauty and Political Action in the Age of Interest

Abstract

Throughout the nineteenth century, a number of major liberal thinkers incorporated aesthetic categories such as “beauty,” “sublimity,” “glory,” and “grandeur” into their sociopolitical thinking. Whereas their aesthetic languages are typically associated with either military imperialism or private aestheticism, I ask whether this moment in liberal history also offers a kind of political aesthetics that, by transcending this binary, can newly inform our debate about liberal democratic politics. Answering this question in the affirmative, my dissertation recovers from this period an aesthetic liberal political thought that is primarily rooted in an anxiety about economic liberalism’s implications for political action. I examine this idea of “aesthetic liberalism” in the writings of three key liberal thinkers in the nineteenth century in different national settings: Alexis de Tocqueville in France, John Stuart Mill in England, and Ralph Waldo Emerson in America. The animating claim of aesthetic liberalism is that beauty has more power to generate political virtues than rational arguments, which reflects the influence of romanticism’s critique of discursive rationality and valorization of imagination in the domain of moral transformation. While being, in varying degrees, committed to modern liberal economy, aesthetic liberals also desired to promote a public-minded political life similar to their own which were dedicated to either advancing liberties within an existing liberal democracy or establishing a liberal constitutional order itself. Opposing both political withdrawal and interest politics typical in liberal market society, all three theorists conceived beauty as a key promoter of a public-spirited political action. Each turns to historical exemplars of action such as the French revolutionaries of 1789 and the American abolitionists to educate the aesthetic sensibility of liberal citizens to embrace public-spirited action in their own lives.