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Contrary to popular belief, Brummell was no peacock. He rejected the baroqueries of Restoration dress with its too-obvious brocades and velvets in favor of an Attic simplicity: blue coat, double-breasted with tails ending above the knee; buff vest projecting slightly above his lapels; pure white cravat, linen, never silk; buff pantaloons, form fitting but never tight; jet black boots. Far from flash, his aim was the subtle perfection of details. That only other cognoscenti could recognize his greatness was, for him, proof of success.

Strange Crib Mates: Aesthetes, Monarchy, and the Rise of the Middle Class™
So far I’ve been using the word aesthetics as though we all know what it means. However, it, too, is an overdetermined word. Taking its name from the Greek aisqhsiV (sensory perception), aesthetics originally attempted to explain, not art, but the process of making individual, sense-based judgments. Far from a dilettantish quest for self-enrichment, its genesis lay instead in a spooky quest for absolute political power.

The seventeenth century is sometimes called the Age of Monarchs or the Age of Absolutism. The two amount to the same thing, for monarch is the person, and absolutism the practice. A monarch is different from a king because, while the latter is one aristocrat among many, a monarch stands alone as the single source of sovereignty, the embodiment of the collective interests and sentiments of his subjects.

The seeds of monarchy were planted in 1555, when the princes of Germany, hoping to avert a religious bloodbath, struck an agreement—the Treaty of Augsburg—that essentially guaranteed the right of each ruler to choose the faith of his own realm. The treaty failed. But as it became increasingly clear that neither Protestants nor Catholics would ever be strong enough to annihilate the other, the terms of Augsburg became more-or-less the practice throughout Europe.