Table of Contents : Submissions : Contributors :Order : Links : Miscellania : Manifesto : Contact

Having been elevated, in effect, to chief mediator between God and lesser mortals, the king acquired a semi-divine aura. He became, so to speak, the prism through which God’s Grace was refracted across the nation and in which the various hues of the commonality were focused into a single, clear light. The right to legislate the spiritual life of individuals had, in fact, opened a new frontier to political control—the human soul. And this transformed kings into monarchs. .

But if monarchs wanted to colonize this new New World, they needed a better roadmap than the haphazard and obviously self-serving doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings (see James I’s charmingly imperious and unpersuasive Trew Law of Free Monarchy). Classical philosophy could offer little guidance. Like the Bush Administration, it eschewed swatting flies in favor of grand policies, disdaining the unruly facts of lived experience, which tended only to obscure the clarity of pure abstraction. But it was precisely the wayward individual heart that monarchs were now attempting to infiltrate. Monarchs needed a philosophical justification for their newly acquired authority as well as a mechanism to wield it efficiently.

The answer was provided by the new science of perception, which formulated the oxymoronic concept of a universal subjective response. (This will sound flimsy, but read Kant, and it will seem almost reasonable.) Aesthetic judgments, so it goes, are subjective because they exist in the observer not the observed (e.g. its not that Nico is a fox, but that I find her so); but a valid judgment, it was assumed, will meet universal approval (e.g. everyone cries at the end of Old Yeller). Aesthetics had tied the Gordian knot. It had found a means of regulating private experience by fusing it to community values. Sound aesthetic judgment lay somewhere between instinct and reason, was sort of like morality, and even more like sanity (only a monster or a madman would serve claret with fois gras!). Aesthetics had, in fact, discovered common sense, a faculty no one realized they possessed until about 1700.

Aesthetics had shown that, through common sense, the sentiments of the many could be contained in the one. The monarch could then assert himself as the first citizen: He was just like everybody else, only better. Exulted and rarefied by his very typicalness, the monarch was simultaneously the representative of and a model for his people. Validated by common sense, his judgments were already stamped on the hearts of his subjects. They were not arbitrary rules, but something approaching natural law, closed to question, irresistible in their self-evidence. (See the court masques of Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones for artistic presentations of these ideas.) Aesthetics showed that the monarch ruled by an unspoken, preexisting consensus. Anyone who did not participate in this consensus was clearly mad, idiotic, or, worst of all, foreign.