42 Vol. 10/1 2021 1 I would like to extend my thanks to Stephen Patrick for revising the English of this essay and to Andrea Robotka for her help with the text and footnotes. 2 For this view, see (Klein, 2002). The Program of Cultural Refinement in 19 th -Century Hungary: the Example of Count Széchenyi and Baron Kemény Ferenc Hörcher In an effort to give a historical depth to recent discussions on taste in Aesthetic theory, this paper recovers a 19 th century Hungarian paradigm. While taste first came to the forefront of philosophical reflection with the Enlightenment and especially with Kant, by now there is a growing literature on the survival of that discourse in the first half of the 19 th century. The present author contributed to the research, which tried to show that in Hungary Count István Széchenyi, an influential political reformer, can be regarded as an author, who for socio-political reasons relied heavily on the British discourse of politeness and taste. This paper aims to show that the same discourse lived on and was employed in the second half of the 19 th century in socio-political debates. The example is Baron Zsigmond Kemény, an admirer and follower of Széchenyi, who transformed the discourse into a bourgeois political-educational program. 1 | Keywords: Taste, Politeness, Refinement, István Széchenyi, Zsigmond Kemény, 19 th century, Hungary 1. The Aesthetic and the Political There has been a renewed interest in taste and politeness in the last twenty years. 2 In the Anglophone world, these notions have been discussed with rising frequency as a result of efforts to approach aesthetic phenomenon more broadly, including much more than the field of the art world. To discuss and possibly theorise such diverse topics as natural or environmental beauty, or popular culture, it is necessary to reassess the categories of judgement and