Title: Reconsidering the “Culture of Order”: Power, Revolution and Slave Trade in Enlightenment’s Aesthetics of the Sublime

Abstract: Latest historical archives of the 18th-century Atlantic world reveal that the aesthetics of the sublime during the Enlightenment is deeply intertwined with the colonial networks of European empires. European democratic revolutions and overseas trade give rise to extreme exploitative practices including imperial colonial expansion and racial slavery. Against this historical backdrop, intellectual elites such as Burke and Kant redefine the concept of the sublime, embedding human transcendence within the aesthetic-political coding of the Enlightenment’s “Culture of Order.” Nevertheless, this alienated abstract “aesthetic consecration” embodies profound anxieties and compromises regarding regime shifts and violent colonial conflicts. Schiller attempts to deconstruct the totalizing illusion of sublime aesthetics through revolutionary theatrical experiments, yet his inherent class limitations confine his aesthetic practice to historicist nostalgia.

Keywords: Enlightenment’s aesthetics of the sublime, Culture of Order, Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schiller

Author: Shixian Liu, Ph.D. Candidate, School of Foreign Studies, Nanjing University, Nanjing, Jiangsu, China.

DOI: 10.19967/j.cnki.flc.2026.02.015