ABSTRACT
The status of aesthetic concepts is at the center of the ongoing re-evaluation of the established narrative of aesthetic autonomy. Reading Hume’s mid-eighteenth-century work Essays Moral, Political, Literary, this chapter argues that the concept of taste—one of the core aesthetic categories of the age—was inextricably connected with ideas about human difference and civilization, and therefore with the domains of morals, history, and politics. To consider taste merely as a capacity for disinterested contemplative pleasure risks reducing the complexity of the eighteenth-century discourse on taste.
