"The Politics of Taste: Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen on the Cultivation of Democratic Judgment"

Is taste a part of moral and political judgment? By extension, is taste a relevant component of an egalitarian civic education? Proponents of the “politics of taste,” such as David Hume and Edmund Burke, suggested fostering existing standards of taste as a palliative to the modern democratic ills they diagnosed. Mary Wollstonecraft however, proposes dramatic revision of the extant model of taste driven by the spread of rational education. In this way she attempts to rescue “true taste” from its gendered and class-based contexts and include it in her educational ideal. In order to deepen and evidence Wollstonecraft’s abstract argument I then bring her texts together with Jane Austen’s exploration of the moral psychology of ladies and gentlemen of taste. This argument has implications for contemporary debates about the value of a liberal arts education, the politics of food, and about what constitutes civil discourse.