ABSTRACT
A leading aim of the Culture Cult is to ennoble the first, to denigrate the second, and to make the very notion of civilization superfluous. This is understandable enough in the case of chip-on-the-shoulder communards and bohemians, who tend to blame all unhappiness on the world around them. But songs in praise of cultural parochialism are a good deal harder to understand from men like T. S. Eliot and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Unable any longer to endure the humiliating discomforts of High Culture, Raymond Williams anthropologically expanded the meaning of the term to give the British Labour Party a creative status equal to the plays of Shakespeare and the poetry of Keats. And in England the beginning was Matthew Arnold's great sermon to his countrymen Culture and Anarchy. His nineteenth-century English version of the term "culture" conveyed almost the opposite of German romantic usage.
