Abstract
The first section, entitled “The Antinomy of Taste”, describes a deep-seated conflict over the idea of taste in Western societies. Whereas one cultural tradition identifies taste with highly personal and more or less arbitrary preferences, the other conceives of it as a capacity for rendering refined judgments that deserve to be heeded. The rest of the chapter presents a genetic account of the antimony, with the author suggesting that the notion of good taste originated with the birth of the gentility.
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Notes
- 1.
Immanuel Kant, Kant’s Critique of Judgement, 2nd ed. revised, trans. J. H. Bernard (London: Macmillan, 1914) 58.
- 2.
Giorgio Tonelli, “Taste in the History of Aesthetics from the Renaissance to 1770”, in Dictionary of the History of Ideas, Vol. IV, ed. Philip P. Wiener (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973) s.v.
- 3.
Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, eds. Guenther Roth and Klaus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978) 1001–1002.
- 4.
Ibidem, 224.
- 5.
Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1934) 230.
- 6.
Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (New York: Macmillan, 1899) 51.
- 7.
Ibidem, 392.
- 8.
H. L. Mencken, Prejudices: First Series (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1919) 72.
- 9.
Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, 370.
- 10.
Ibidem, 382.
- 11.
Ibidem, 383.
- 12.
John H. Kautsky, The Politics of Aristocratic Empires (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1982) 24.
- 13.
Ibidem, 75.
- 14.
Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism (London: Smith Elder, 1909) viii.
- 15.
Ibidem, xi.
- 16.
R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946) 230.
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Mitchell, J. (2019). Introductory: On the Ethos of Good Taste or Gentility. In: On the Decline of the Genteel Virtues. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20354-2_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20354-2_1
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