In his Reflections on the Revolution in France Burke politicises and depoliticises the imagination. Imagination is depicted as obscuring the power relations which underpin the workings of the state and as maintaining the status quo through a pleasing state of false consciousness. In his defence of British liberty and in his attack upon the new French constitution, Burke highlights imagination's central role in the formation of ideology. In its famous aestheticisation of politics the Reflections at the same time exposes and celebrates the mechanism of a faculty which keeps the naked workings of power from the ordinary citizen. In this sense, imagination for Burke may be said to be symptomatic of civil society itself. It is the faculty which provides the citizen's perception of the benefits of being in civil society as distinct from a state of nature. And in this peculiarly powerful double-take imagination is charged with carrying out a seemingly impossible task: of providing the subject with a sense of self-consciousness of his role in the body politic at the same time as pleasingly hiding from him the stark nature of the contract he has made with the state in order to enjoy the benefits of civil society. This ideological doubling of imagination in Burke's Reflections is, of course, further complicated by the fact that the text's strategic epistolary rhetoric, as well as its most famous scenes of violation, at the same time appeal graphically to the imagination of its reader.