Though Terry Eagleton in his The Ideology of the Aesthetic acknowledges that the aesthetic is "an eminently contradictory phenomenon", the thrust of his argument is to reduce its potential for disruption by positing it as an ideological tool of the bourgeoisie. To this end, he begins by placing the rise of aesthetics as an object of enquiry in a relation with absolutist power:

What germinates in the eighteenth century as the strange new discourse of aesthetics is not a challenge to that political authority; but it can be read as symptomatic of an ideological dilemma inherent in absolutist power. Such power needs for its own purposes to take account of "sensible" life, for without an understanding of this no dominion can be secure. The world of feelings and sensations can surely not just be surrendered to the "subjective", to what Kant scornfully termed the "egoism of taste"; instead it must be brought within the majestic scope of reason itself.