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Thesis Hume’s “true judges” are simply people with leisure, and Bourdieu showed it

Hugo Marchetti Fellow
· 5 replies
Beauty & artContinentalModern EuropeanDavid HumeImmanuel KantPierre Bourdieu#class#cultural-capital#distinction#standard-of-taste
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Where it stands

Look at Hume's list of what makes a good critic: delicacy, practice, comparison, freedom from prejudice, good sense. Now ask who has the time to practise and compare. Not my father, who unloaded ships in Marseille for forty years and listened to the same twenty songs. Not most people on my crane shift.

Bourdieu's Distinction (1979) made this into a study. He surveyed what the French liked, from photographs to music to furniture, and found that taste lines up with class and education with embarrassing precision. His famous line, in the Richard Nice translation, is that taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier. Saying a song is vulgar tells everyone where you stand.

So my thesis: the "standard of taste" is a class standard dressed up as a universal one. Hume's qualifications are the qualifications of people who already had money and schooling, and the verdict of "true judges" over time is the verdict of the class that could afford to be judges.

I am not saying nothing is better than anything. I am saying that when someone calls a preference unsophisticated, they are usually telling you about their education, not about the work. Convince me otherwise.

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5 replies

For the thesis 2

  1. Jorge Bonfim

    For Fellow

    For, with a Brazilian example. Capoeira was made a crime in the penal code of 1890, after abolition. The elites who wrote that law did not think they were expressing a class taste; they thought they were defending civilisation against disorder. Decades later the same art was taught in academies and celebrated as national culture. Nothing in the game changed. What changed was who was allowed to judge it.

    Helpful · 2
  2. Javier Ferrandis

    For Fellow

    For. Taste works like a positional good: part of its value is that others don't have it. Once a cultural form becomes widely accessible, the educated often move on to something rarer. Bourdieu documents this churn. That doesn't prove nothing is better than anything, but it means we should expect a lot of what passes for refined judgement to be signalling.

Against the thesis 2

  1. Henrike Vogel

    Against Fellow

    Against. You have shown where tastes come from, not that they are mistaken. That one learned to love Bach at a lycée does not show Bach is not worth loving; that would be judging a belief by its origin. Bourdieu's data are compatible with two stories: taste merely marks class, or education gives some people access to real qualities that others were unfairly denied. The second story is a scandal about access, not about value. Kant, for what it is worth, located taste in faculties that everyone shares, which is the opposite of a class standard.

    Helpful · 1
  2. Keisha Monroe

    Against Fellow

    Against, carefully. Jorge's example cuts both ways. The blues and capoeira were dismissed by the "qualified" of their day, and then the long test of time, which is Hume's test, overturned that verdict. Hume says the works that survive across ages and nations are the real evidence, precisely because one generation's prejudices wash out. That is a self-correcting standard, slow and unjust in the meantime, but not merely a class one.

    Helpful · 3

Other replies

  1. Hugo Marchetti

    Fellow

    Henrike and Keisha, you have moved me. I will grant that origin does not settle value, and that the long test can correct a class verdict. Bourdieu himself called his postscript a "vulgar" critique of the "pure" critiques, which I now read as an attack on Kant's pretensions rather than a proof that beauty is fake. Revised thesis: the qualifications Hume lists are real, but they are rationed by class, so the standard is sound and the jury is rigged. My father would have made a fine judge of songs with a library card and some evenings free.

    Helpful · 1