"Taste cannot be controlled by law"
About this Quote
Jefferson’s line is a small, elegant act of boundary-setting: the state can police conduct, but it can’t successfully police sensibility. “Taste” is doing a lot of work here. It’s not just a preference for wine or wallpaper; it’s the private faculty that decides what is beautiful, refined, obscene, blasphemous, tacky, or “appropriate.” By declaring it beyond law, Jefferson isn’t celebrating bad art so much as warning lawmakers away from a temptation as old as power itself: once a government claims authority over what people should admire, it quickly claims authority over what they should think.
The subtext is class-aware and politically shrewd. Taste is often weaponized by elites as a proxy for virtue, a way to dress social hierarchy in the neutral clothing of “standards.” Jefferson flips that script. If taste is inherently ungovernable, then using statutes to enforce it becomes both ridiculous and dangerous, a kind of moral cosplay that turns preference into punishment.
Context matters: Jefferson lived in a young republic allergic to Old World censorship and sumptuary rules, but perpetually anxious about vice, sedition, and religious heterodoxy. His broader project, especially in arguments for religious freedom, insists that coercion can produce compliance, not conviction. “Taste cannot be controlled by law” compresses that Enlightenment confidence into a single sentence: you can mandate behavior, even speech, but you cannot legislate genuine assent. Attempts to do so don’t uplift the public; they reveal a government insecure enough to confuse force with persuasion.
The subtext is class-aware and politically shrewd. Taste is often weaponized by elites as a proxy for virtue, a way to dress social hierarchy in the neutral clothing of “standards.” Jefferson flips that script. If taste is inherently ungovernable, then using statutes to enforce it becomes both ridiculous and dangerous, a kind of moral cosplay that turns preference into punishment.
Context matters: Jefferson lived in a young republic allergic to Old World censorship and sumptuary rules, but perpetually anxious about vice, sedition, and religious heterodoxy. His broader project, especially in arguments for religious freedom, insists that coercion can produce compliance, not conviction. “Taste cannot be controlled by law” compresses that Enlightenment confidence into a single sentence: you can mandate behavior, even speech, but you cannot legislate genuine assent. Attempts to do so don’t uplift the public; they reveal a government insecure enough to confuse force with persuasion.
Quote Details
| Topic | Freedom |
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