What is the relationship between literary appreciation and attitudes toward diversity in modern liberal democracies? This presentation discusses how literary criticism has contributed to the advancement of pluralism by tracing its origins in the aesthetic and moral thought of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. It describes how an awareness of aesthetic diversity relativised standards of taste, and discusses the emergence of a form of dispassionate appreciation that called for understanding without subjective liking. Taken together, these developments show how aesthetic criticism predicated itself upon reasoned disagreement, cultivating the attitudes and habits of mind that are characteristic of liberal tolerance.