What do you think?
Rate this book
Culture and Anarchy & Other Writings
Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy (1869), is one of the most celebrated works of social criticism ever written. It has become a reference point for all subsequent discussion of the relations between politics and culture. This edition establishes the authoritative text of this much-revised work, and places it alongside Arnold's three most important essays on political subjects. The introduction sets these works in the context of nineteenth-century intellectual and political history. This edition also contains a chronology of Arnold's life, a bibliographical guide and full notes on the names and historical events mentioned in the texts.
Hardcover
First published January 1, 1875
About the author
Matthew Arnold
1,420 books181 followersPoems, such as "Dover Beach" (1867), of British critic Matthew Arnold express moral and religious doubts alongside his
Culture and Anarchy
, a polemic of 1869 against Victorian materialism.
Matthew Arnold, an English sage writer, worked as an inspector of schools. Thomas Arnold, the famed headmaster of rugby school, fathered him and and Tom Arnold, his brother and literary professor, alongside William Delafield Arnold, novelist and colonial administrator.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew...
Matthew Arnold, an English sage writer, worked as an inspector of schools. Thomas Arnold, the famed headmaster of rugby school, fathered him and and Tom Arnold, his brother and literary professor, alongside William Delafield Arnold, novelist and colonial administrator.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew...
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
June 15, 2012
All the writings collected in this volume have as their central theme Arnold's advocacy of an autonomous role for culture in a society being transformed by industrialization and the ascendance of a middle class detached from, and even hostile too, the cultural aspirations and achievements of the aristocracy it is replacing.
Arnold's definition of culture is a complex one, but its basic characteristic is the pursuit of an internal ideal of perfection that owes much to romanticism, Plato, and even Hegel:
"The whole scope of the essay is to recommend culture as the great help out of our present difficulties; culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world; and through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically, vainly imagining that there is a virtue in following them staunchly which makes up for the mischief of following them mechanically. This, and this alone, is the scope of the following essay. And the culture we recommend is, above all, an inward operation" (190).
Culture and Anarchy is a book which more than merits the appellation "seminal," for so much of the language subsequently used to describe culture and its place in society originated with it: the notion of culture as "sweetness and light," the description of the middle class as "Philistines," and the contrast of "Hebraism" and "Hellenism. "
Arnold's special target are the Philistines, that vast portion of the self-satisfied Victorian bourgeoisie that has been shaped – and warped in Arnold's view – by the narrow-minded Puritan and Nonconformist worldview that has dominated England for the last two centuries. These all congratulate themselves for achievements like free trade and freedom of thought that Arnold dismisses as mere mechanism, empty and formal ideals which have no higher purpose behind them.
The other essays in the book are also well worth reading, as they touch on the political implications of Arnold's view on culture. In "Democracy," Arnold criticizes the traditional English suspicion of state power and action. "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time" is Arnold's exposition of the necessity and role of the critic, which he sees as the constant application of independent thought the conventional wisdom of society. The last essay, "Equality, " is a powerful challenge to his contemporaries to abandon their infatuation with inequality. Far from being a hallmark of the greatness of their society, Arnold warns, the great inequality which marks English society is one of its primary weaknesses, for it harms the individual who suffers it, and thereby compromises the society which suffers it.
If there is one weakness in Arnold's conception of culture, it is his conviction that the highest cultural ideal requires the critic to stand apart from the politics of his day and use his powers to criticize contemporary politicians rather than using them to offer specific proposals and advice. There is merit to his view that the critic’s task should be to urge the powers that be to think anew what they are doing and why they are doing it. Yet the criticism his opponents leveled at Arnold, that he was extolling a kind of quietism, themselves have some justice. He avers that "our main business at the present moment is not so much to work away at certain crude reforms for which we have already the scheme in our own mind, as to create," by means of culture, "a frame of mind out of which the schemes of really fruitful reforms may with time grow" (179). Yet when he does so, he sounds not a little like Jefferson lamenting slavery: it's terrible, but doing something about it would be worse.
When he decries anarchy and disorder, Arnold comes across as deeply conservative. This impression is more than buttressed by his disdain for the Victorian infatuation with "doing as one likes." Yet no one who pronounces the French Revolution "the greatest, the most animating event in history" can be construed as any sort of Burkean (32). Arnold is better styled a contrarian or skeptic, one who challenges the conventional wisdom and reigning orthodoxies of his day. In an age in which we have become even more fixated upon mechanism and machinery; one where even wider scope has been granted to our Hebraic tendencies at the expense of the Hellenic, so that our society is overrun with those of whom we can say as justly as Arnold did, that "No man, who knows nothing else, knows even his Bible" (145); one in which the state should be "the expression, as we say, of our best self," but becomes more and more the dominion of what is "manifold, and vulgar, and unstable, and contentious, and ever-varying" (181). In such an age, for all his shortcomings, a Matthew Arnold is not only welcome, but necessary.
Published: Friday, 15 June 2012
Arnold's definition of culture is a complex one, but its basic characteristic is the pursuit of an internal ideal of perfection that owes much to romanticism, Plato, and even Hegel:
"The whole scope of the essay is to recommend culture as the great help out of our present difficulties; culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world; and through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically, vainly imagining that there is a virtue in following them staunchly which makes up for the mischief of following them mechanically. This, and this alone, is the scope of the following essay. And the culture we recommend is, above all, an inward operation" (190).
Culture and Anarchy is a book which more than merits the appellation "seminal," for so much of the language subsequently used to describe culture and its place in society originated with it: the notion of culture as "sweetness and light," the description of the middle class as "Philistines," and the contrast of "Hebraism" and "Hellenism. "
Arnold's special target are the Philistines, that vast portion of the self-satisfied Victorian bourgeoisie that has been shaped – and warped in Arnold's view – by the narrow-minded Puritan and Nonconformist worldview that has dominated England for the last two centuries. These all congratulate themselves for achievements like free trade and freedom of thought that Arnold dismisses as mere mechanism, empty and formal ideals which have no higher purpose behind them.
The other essays in the book are also well worth reading, as they touch on the political implications of Arnold's view on culture. In "Democracy," Arnold criticizes the traditional English suspicion of state power and action. "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time" is Arnold's exposition of the necessity and role of the critic, which he sees as the constant application of independent thought the conventional wisdom of society. The last essay, "Equality, " is a powerful challenge to his contemporaries to abandon their infatuation with inequality. Far from being a hallmark of the greatness of their society, Arnold warns, the great inequality which marks English society is one of its primary weaknesses, for it harms the individual who suffers it, and thereby compromises the society which suffers it.
If there is one weakness in Arnold's conception of culture, it is his conviction that the highest cultural ideal requires the critic to stand apart from the politics of his day and use his powers to criticize contemporary politicians rather than using them to offer specific proposals and advice. There is merit to his view that the critic’s task should be to urge the powers that be to think anew what they are doing and why they are doing it. Yet the criticism his opponents leveled at Arnold, that he was extolling a kind of quietism, themselves have some justice. He avers that "our main business at the present moment is not so much to work away at certain crude reforms for which we have already the scheme in our own mind, as to create," by means of culture, "a frame of mind out of which the schemes of really fruitful reforms may with time grow" (179). Yet when he does so, he sounds not a little like Jefferson lamenting slavery: it's terrible, but doing something about it would be worse.
When he decries anarchy and disorder, Arnold comes across as deeply conservative. This impression is more than buttressed by his disdain for the Victorian infatuation with "doing as one likes." Yet no one who pronounces the French Revolution "the greatest, the most animating event in history" can be construed as any sort of Burkean (32). Arnold is better styled a contrarian or skeptic, one who challenges the conventional wisdom and reigning orthodoxies of his day. In an age in which we have become even more fixated upon mechanism and machinery; one where even wider scope has been granted to our Hebraic tendencies at the expense of the Hellenic, so that our society is overrun with those of whom we can say as justly as Arnold did, that "No man, who knows nothing else, knows even his Bible" (145); one in which the state should be "the expression, as we say, of our best self," but becomes more and more the dominion of what is "manifold, and vulgar, and unstable, and contentious, and ever-varying" (181). In such an age, for all his shortcomings, a Matthew Arnold is not only welcome, but necessary.
Published: Friday, 15 June 2012
November 25, 2023
There are points I may disagree with, but Matthew Arnold was a force. His essays are illuminating and surprisingly relevant.
Memorable passages:
On freedom as service: "And we no more allow absolute validity to his stock maxim, ‘Liberty is the law of human life,’ than we allow it to the opposite maxim, which is just as true, ‘Renouncement is the law of human life.’ For we know that the only perfect freedom is, as our religion says, a service...."
On doing what one likes: "at the bottom of our present unsettled state, so full of seeds of trouble, lies the notion of its being the prime right and happiness, for each of us, to affirm himself, and his ordinary self; to be doing, and to be doing freely and as he likes."
On democracy: "The difficulty for democracy is, how to find and keep high ideals. . . Nations are not truly great solely because the individuals composing them are numerous, free, and active; but they are great when these numbers, this freedom, and this activity are employed in the service of an ideal higher than that of an ordinary man, taken by himself. Our society is probably destined to become much more democratic; who or what will give a high tone to the nation then? That is the grave question."
On the illusion of rights: "For my part, the deeper I go in my own consciousness, and the more simply I abandon myself to it, the more it seems to tell me that I have no rights at all, only duties; and that men get this notion of rights from a process of abstract reasoning...."
On the overemphasis of personal liberty: "the central idea of English life and politics is the assertion of personal liberty. Evidently this is so; but evidently, also, as feudalism, which with its ideas and habits of subordination was for many centuries silently behind the British constitution, dies out, and we are left with nothing but our system of checks, and our notion of its being the great right and happiness of an Englishman to do as far as possible what he likes, we are in danger of drifting towards anarchy."
On Philistinism: "Now, the use of culture is that it helps us, by means of its spiritual standard of perfection, to regard wealth as but machinery, and not only to say as a matter of words that we regard wealth as but machinery, but really to perceive and feel that it is so. . . The people who believe most that our greatness and welfare are proved by our being very rich, and who give their lives and thoughts to becoming rich, are just the very people whom we call Philistines."
On statesmen: "Even supposing them to be originally no better or wiser than the rest of the world, they have two great advantages from their position: access to almost boundless means of information, and the enlargement of mind which the habit of dealing with great affairs tends to produce. Their position itself, therefore, if they are men of only average honesty and capacity, tends to give them a fitness for acting on behalf of the nation superior to that of other men of equal honesty and capacity who are not in the same position."
On culture and perfection: "The idea of perfection as an inward condition of the mind and spirit is at variance with the mechanical and material civilisation in esteem with us, and nowhere, as I have said, so much in esteem as with us. The idea of perfection as a general expansion of the human family is at variance with our strong individualism, our hatred of all limits to the unrestrained swing of the individual's personality, our maxim of 'every man for himself.'"
On the habits of feudalism: "For a long time, as I have said, the strong feudal habits of subordination and deference continued to tell upon the working class. The modern spirit has now almost entirely dissolved those habits, and the anarchical tendency of our worship of freedom in and for itself, of our superstitious faith, as I say, in machinery, is becoming very manifest. More and more, because of this our blind faith in machinery, because of our want of light to enable us to look beyond machinery to the end for which machinery is valuable, this and that man, and this and that body of men, all over the country, are beginning to assert and put in practice an Englishman's right to do what he likes. . . All this, I say, tends to anarchy."
On strong and weak principles: "Having, I say, at the bottom of our English hearts a very strong belief in freedom, and a very weak belief in right reason, we are soon silenced when a man pleads the prime right to do as he likes, because this is the prime right for ourselves too; and even if we attempt now and then to mumble something about reason, yet we have ourselves thought so little about this and so much about liberty, that we are in conscience forced, when our brother Philistine with whom we are meddling turns boldly round upon us and asks: Have you any light?--to shake our heads ruefully, and to let him go his own way after all."
On aristocratic habits in an "age of expansion," such as ours: "The best powers shown by the best men of an aristocracy at such an epoch are, it will be observed, non-aristocractical powers, powers of industry, powers of intelligence; and these powers thus exhibited, tend really not to strengthen the aristocracy, but to take their owners out of it, to expose them to the dissolving agencies of thought and change, to make them men of the modern spirit and of the future."
On the Philstine (middle class) instinct: "it is its class and its class instinct which it seeks to affirm--its ordinary self, not its best self; and it is a machinery, and industrial machinery, and power and pre-eminence and other external goods, which fill its thoughts, and not an inward perfection. It is wholly occupied, according to Plato's subtle expression, with the things of itself and not its real self, with the things of the State and not the real State.'"
On the politics of comfort and self-interest: "But our whole scheme of government being representative, every one of our governors has all possible temptation, instead of setting up before the governed who elect him, and on whose favour he depends, a high standard of right reason, to accommodate himself as much as possible to their natural taste for the bathos. . . [I]n our political system everybody is comforted."
On the instability of expanding liberalism: "Everybody has his own little vision of religious or civil perfection. Under the evident impossibility of satisfying everybody, we agree to take our stand on equal laws and on a system as open and liberal as is possible. The result is that everybody has more liberty of action and of speaking here than anywhere else in the Old World.' . . . This is the old story of our system of checks and every Englishmen doing as he likes, which we have already seen to have been convenient enough so long as there were only the Barbarians and the Philistines to do what they liked, but to be getting inconvenient, and productive of anarchy, now that the Populace wants to do what it likes too."
Memorable passages:
On freedom as service: "And we no more allow absolute validity to his stock maxim, ‘Liberty is the law of human life,’ than we allow it to the opposite maxim, which is just as true, ‘Renouncement is the law of human life.’ For we know that the only perfect freedom is, as our religion says, a service...."
On doing what one likes: "at the bottom of our present unsettled state, so full of seeds of trouble, lies the notion of its being the prime right and happiness, for each of us, to affirm himself, and his ordinary self; to be doing, and to be doing freely and as he likes."
On democracy: "The difficulty for democracy is, how to find and keep high ideals. . . Nations are not truly great solely because the individuals composing them are numerous, free, and active; but they are great when these numbers, this freedom, and this activity are employed in the service of an ideal higher than that of an ordinary man, taken by himself. Our society is probably destined to become much more democratic; who or what will give a high tone to the nation then? That is the grave question."
On the illusion of rights: "For my part, the deeper I go in my own consciousness, and the more simply I abandon myself to it, the more it seems to tell me that I have no rights at all, only duties; and that men get this notion of rights from a process of abstract reasoning...."
On the overemphasis of personal liberty: "the central idea of English life and politics is the assertion of personal liberty. Evidently this is so; but evidently, also, as feudalism, which with its ideas and habits of subordination was for many centuries silently behind the British constitution, dies out, and we are left with nothing but our system of checks, and our notion of its being the great right and happiness of an Englishman to do as far as possible what he likes, we are in danger of drifting towards anarchy."
On Philistinism: "Now, the use of culture is that it helps us, by means of its spiritual standard of perfection, to regard wealth as but machinery, and not only to say as a matter of words that we regard wealth as but machinery, but really to perceive and feel that it is so. . . The people who believe most that our greatness and welfare are proved by our being very rich, and who give their lives and thoughts to becoming rich, are just the very people whom we call Philistines."
On statesmen: "Even supposing them to be originally no better or wiser than the rest of the world, they have two great advantages from their position: access to almost boundless means of information, and the enlargement of mind which the habit of dealing with great affairs tends to produce. Their position itself, therefore, if they are men of only average honesty and capacity, tends to give them a fitness for acting on behalf of the nation superior to that of other men of equal honesty and capacity who are not in the same position."
On culture and perfection: "The idea of perfection as an inward condition of the mind and spirit is at variance with the mechanical and material civilisation in esteem with us, and nowhere, as I have said, so much in esteem as with us. The idea of perfection as a general expansion of the human family is at variance with our strong individualism, our hatred of all limits to the unrestrained swing of the individual's personality, our maxim of 'every man for himself.'"
On the habits of feudalism: "For a long time, as I have said, the strong feudal habits of subordination and deference continued to tell upon the working class. The modern spirit has now almost entirely dissolved those habits, and the anarchical tendency of our worship of freedom in and for itself, of our superstitious faith, as I say, in machinery, is becoming very manifest. More and more, because of this our blind faith in machinery, because of our want of light to enable us to look beyond machinery to the end for which machinery is valuable, this and that man, and this and that body of men, all over the country, are beginning to assert and put in practice an Englishman's right to do what he likes. . . All this, I say, tends to anarchy."
On strong and weak principles: "Having, I say, at the bottom of our English hearts a very strong belief in freedom, and a very weak belief in right reason, we are soon silenced when a man pleads the prime right to do as he likes, because this is the prime right for ourselves too; and even if we attempt now and then to mumble something about reason, yet we have ourselves thought so little about this and so much about liberty, that we are in conscience forced, when our brother Philistine with whom we are meddling turns boldly round upon us and asks: Have you any light?--to shake our heads ruefully, and to let him go his own way after all."
On aristocratic habits in an "age of expansion," such as ours: "The best powers shown by the best men of an aristocracy at such an epoch are, it will be observed, non-aristocractical powers, powers of industry, powers of intelligence; and these powers thus exhibited, tend really not to strengthen the aristocracy, but to take their owners out of it, to expose them to the dissolving agencies of thought and change, to make them men of the modern spirit and of the future."
On the Philstine (middle class) instinct: "it is its class and its class instinct which it seeks to affirm--its ordinary self, not its best self; and it is a machinery, and industrial machinery, and power and pre-eminence and other external goods, which fill its thoughts, and not an inward perfection. It is wholly occupied, according to Plato's subtle expression, with the things of itself and not its real self, with the things of the State and not the real State.'"
On the politics of comfort and self-interest: "But our whole scheme of government being representative, every one of our governors has all possible temptation, instead of setting up before the governed who elect him, and on whose favour he depends, a high standard of right reason, to accommodate himself as much as possible to their natural taste for the bathos. . . [I]n our political system everybody is comforted."
On the instability of expanding liberalism: "Everybody has his own little vision of religious or civil perfection. Under the evident impossibility of satisfying everybody, we agree to take our stand on equal laws and on a system as open and liberal as is possible. The result is that everybody has more liberty of action and of speaking here than anywhere else in the Old World.' . . . This is the old story of our system of checks and every Englishmen doing as he likes, which we have already seen to have been convenient enough so long as there were only the Barbarians and the Philistines to do what they liked, but to be getting inconvenient, and productive of anarchy, now that the Populace wants to do what it likes too."
Read
March 21, 2026I had been intending to read this since the first years of grad school, when during a beer-fueled discussion session in a friend's apartment, our friend PJ referred to this warmly. More recently, it gets cited by Stanley Cavell in his discussion of The Philadelphia Story in his Pursuits of Happiness, where it comes up in reference to arguments about ethical perfectionism. And Zed and I are currently in a debate in the philosophy journals over the importance of seriousness (of all things) in aesthetic judgment—we are for it, our opponent is against it—and Arnold seems like the critic standing behind all of the others who is resolutely for seriousness. So I finally had a reason to read this. It turns out that while he is very serious, Arnold is also, at times, very funny, and at other times...disturbingly anti-Irish.
The most important clash for my present purposes is between Arnold and the advocate of the freedom of "doing as one likes" (I guess that might be J.S. Mill). Arnold is for "culture", which is the attempt to perfect oneself, and against "anarchy" (doing whatever one likes). It's hard in the present era to argue for any substantive conception of culture, as opposed to just letting people enjoy stuff (whatever it may be), but it's also hard to deny that we could be doing more to cultivate more "sweetness and light", and "reading, observing, and thinking" (94).
The most important clash for my present purposes is between Arnold and the advocate of the freedom of "doing as one likes" (I guess that might be J.S. Mill). Arnold is for "culture", which is the attempt to perfect oneself, and against "anarchy" (doing whatever one likes). It's hard in the present era to argue for any substantive conception of culture, as opposed to just letting people enjoy stuff (whatever it may be), but it's also hard to deny that we could be doing more to cultivate more "sweetness and light", and "reading, observing, and thinking" (94).
April 12, 2008
A late Romantic gasping for air in the onslaught of the West's new religion: liberalism and *free market* capitalism.
August 22, 2009
It takes awhile to understand, but it really enlightened me to the depths of literary criticism.
October 16, 2007
Arnold, you ivory-towerist. (He does create a space for the intellectual, which is good. But we should ALL be the intellectual. The space should be everywhere. We should all be the artist :)-in artistic (non-artsy) and diverse ways.)
June 28, 2008
Blow it out your ass, Arnold. What, am I too Hebraistic for you?
April 29, 2017
"A pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world.."
Which amounted , for Arnold, to salvation by culture.
Which amounted , for Arnold, to salvation by culture.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews