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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.

Monarchal absolutism in England was cut short with Charles I’s neck. But it turned out that aesthetics, born in service to despotism, served democracy equally well. While the monarch had needed the concept of common sense to make his rule seem natural, common sense had no need of the monarch. As the God-given faculty of every right-thinking Briton, common sense was the property of no individual but a law unto itself. Become wholly an abstraction, common sense with its implied unanimity ruled more tyrannically than any king.

Enter the Era of the Bourgeoisie.

Bourgeois Natural History
Now, as buzzwords go, bourgeoisie is overdetermined par excellence. A Philosopher’s Stone for lazy historians, The Rise of the Bourgeoisie can be made the catalyst of nearly any cultural shift. The particular revolution occurring in eighteenth-century Britain, however, had nothing to do with a rising middle class—getting away with regicide, after all, is a good sign that, politically, you have arrived. What was pervading society, in fact, was not a new class, but this new ideology—if you prefer, call it a set of fundamental cultural assumptions—that had been created by aesthetic philosophy (see Terry Eagleton’s Ideology of the Aesthetic for details. Then tell me about it, for at 500 pages, I haven’t got through the book either :-( ).