ABSTRACT
Around the time of the First World War, and as the humanist cultural project got underway in international relations, an alternative project, also based upon an idea of culture, was being established in the United States. This was the anthropological concept. In its infancy at the time of Norman Angell, this concept would be firmly in place by the time Gilbert Murray worried about the future of civilization in 1935. By the late 1940s, the ‘modern’ anthropological concept of culture was being described as “the foundation stone of the social sciences” (cited in Stocking 1968/82:302). Plainly, the idea of culture had travelled a long way since Matthew Arnold claimed culture was the ‘best of everything.’ It had become synonymous in American thinking with scientific study and a ‘way of life.’
