It is not at all strange that dandyism emerged during the Regency. But apart from the technical and social circumstances already mentioned, why in England and not in France or Italy? According to Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, dandy author of the late nineteenth century, this social phenomenon could only arise in a very old and civilized society

where comedy becomes so rare, and the properties hardly have the better of boredom. Nowhere has the antagonism between these and the ennui they create been so acutely felt in the heart of social life, as in England, where the Bible and the rights of man wield such sway, and it is perhaps from the very ferocity of this struggle, which is eternal, like the duel between sin and death in Milton, that springs the profound originality of this puritan society…¹

Thus, the dandy converts the weariness and apathy of his society—the so-called British phlegm—into a style and manners that make him the bearer of an entirely modern attitude that “achieves the subordination of being into appearing and converts ethics into aesthetics.”² This conversion of ethics into aesthetics points to an issue, essential to modern society, that delves into the terrains of metaphysics. Namely, that

an epistemological duality has recoiled into an ontological unity: essence is really appearance, and appearance really is essence. Society’s image of itself is the real reality of society, its reality an image; society’s form is society’s content, its content is its form.³

A world in which ethics, understood as a genuine body of social norms, and aesthetics, the sensitive forms of these norms, intermix, is a world in which inside and outside are in constant danger of being confused.

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1. Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, “Del dandismo y de George Brummell”, in Prodigiosos Mirmidones, 112-13. ↩︎
2. Carlos Primo and Leticia García, “Una apología del dandismo”, 24. ↩︎
3. Andy Merrifield, Magical Marxism, 35-6. ↩︎