ABSTRACT
According to Raymond Williams, the hostility often expressed towards the word ‘culture’ dates from the controversy generated by Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869), a work which to that extent may be said to have generated the very philistinism it wished to vanquish.1 It would be difficult to underestimate the importance and influence of this book as a central, indeed foundational, account of culture for the humanities in Britain and the United States. Arnold’s culture is often assumed to involve the propagation of high culture in the service of an organicist nationalism. In fact, it is a good deal more complicated than that, and comes much closer to certain aspects of contemporary cultural politics than one might expect. Arnold remains very much within the parameters of Enlightenment assumptions about the progress of civilization towards perfection. At the same time, however, his account bears a close relation to Herder’s description of culture as something antithetical to the main material tenets of civilization’s advance.2 So Arnold rejects any assimilation of human perfection to a mechanical materialism. Culture, he argues, is not even a matter of belles lettres or aesthetics, for it involves a higher, inward spiritual principle. He opposes this to the self-interested material goals of industrial life, often simply designated as in Carlyle as ‘machinery’. But Arnold by no means proposes an ivory-towered retreat from industrialization. For, like cultural theorists of our own day, Arnold is very much concerned to emphasize culture’s social function and its role in promoting social change. As Williams demonstrates in Culture and Society, the first cultural critics were Romantic writers such as Burke and Coleridge. Arnold, like so many others in the literary tradition since, shared their desire to move from literature and aesthetics per se to something beyond them, to a larger function in that world that is represented in literary texts. We could characterize this as a repeated Quixotic tendency to mistake the representation for the thing itself, or otherwise as the desire to colonize, inhabit, cultivate, not just literature as such but also the object of literature, the outside world, and thus to incorporate it within the institution of culture.
