ABSTRACT
The popular culture of the majority has always been a concern of powerful minorities. Matthew Arnold's significance is that he inaugurates a tradition, a particular way of seeing popular culture, a particular way of placing popular culture within the general field of culture. The tradition has come to be known as the 'culture and civilization' tradition. Leavisism is based on the assumption that 'culture has always been in minority keeping': Upon the minority depends people’s power of profiting by the finest human experience of the past; they keep alive the subtlest and most perishable parts of tradition. While in the organic community everyday culture was a constant support to the health of the individual, in mass civilization one must make a conscious and directed effort to avoid the unhealthy influence of everyday culture. The anxieties of the 'culture and civilization' tradition are anxieties about social and cultural extension: how to deal with challenges to cultural and social exclusivity.
