Culture and Anarchy

by Matthew Arnold

Culture and Anarchy, by English poet, cultural critic, and school inspector Matthew Arnold, was originally published in 1869. The work is a collection of periodical high-Victorian cultural essays, originally published in Cornhill Magazine between 1867-68. Within the work, Arnold defines culture as the study of perfection, contrasting it with anarchy, which lacks standards and direction. He also defined English society into three camps. The Barbarians, with high spirits, calmness, and manners, the Philistines, or the religious non-conformists, who were strong in morality and energy, and the Populace, who were raw, unformed, and blind. Arnold also saw the notion of the State as being an object of unity, which should cross classes, and attempt to put forward the nation's best self.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Essays, Classics, Politics, History, Cultural

122 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1869

About the author

Poems, 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...

Reviews

[BrokenTune · Rating 3 out of 5]

But what is greatness?— culture makes us ask. Greatness is a spiritual condition worthy to excite love, interest, and admiration; and the outward proof of possessing greatness is that we excite love, interest, and admiration.

Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy was an odd book to come back to in these times of talk about making things "great" again. I had first read the book way back when I was at university. Back then, I read the book with the purpose of finding arguments for and against different aspects of "culture" and whatever that meant, but I never got the time to read what Arnold actually had to say beyond his eternal buzzwords of "sweetness and light", both which are still as vague as ever.

Having revisited with Arnold over the past couple of weeks, the best I can say is that I am glad I have read the book without the pressing agenda of writing a piece of coursework about it. There are a lot of sides to Arnold's writing that are worth exploring - tho, his sometimes tongue-in-cheek style of narration has left me wondering more than a few times which point he was trying to make.

Just like the quote about greatness could be interpreted to mean all things to all people, Arnold's argumentation by use of fictional characters (and few real ones) generalised his ideas so much, that for most of the book I was left wanting to shout at him: "But where is your proof? Where are your sources for making this claim? What evidence have you to support your claim?"

And this was true even more so with the points I wanted to agree with, than it was with the sketchy claims I was looking to refute. It sounds great to hear Arnold use such flowery rhetoric like:

"It is in making endless additions to itself, in the endless expansion of its powers, in endless growth in wisdom and beauty, that the spirit of the human race finds its ideal. To reach this ideal, culture is an indispensable aid, and that is the true value of culture." Not a having and a resting, but a growing and a becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it; and here, too, it coincides with religion. And because men are all members of one great whole, and the sympathy which is in human nature will not allow one member to be indifferent to the rest, or to have a perfect welfare independent of the rest, the expansion of our humanity, to suit the idea of perfection which culture forms, must be a general expansion.

But where are his examples?
It sounds great to hear Arnold refer to "men are all members of one great whole" but in the same line of argument, he becomes divisive, too, when referring to the members of the working class not knowing what they want, to members of the middle class as wanting the wrong thing, to the members of the aristocracy as being too remote and not intervening enough in the frivolous pursuit of industry, to Philistines and Barbarians. But most divisively of all, Arnold seems to restrict the benefit of the application of "culture" as he saw it to the English.

"In the first place, it never was any part of our creed that the great right and blessedness of an Irishman, or, indeed, of anybody on earth except an Englishman, is to do as he likes; and we can have no scruple at all about abridging, if necessary, a non-Englishman's assertion of personal liberty. The British Constitution, its checks, and its prime virtues, are for Englishmen. We may extend them to others out of love and kindness; but we find no real divine law written on our hearts constraining us so to extend them."

Sarcasm? Or true sentiment? It depends on the reader's own outlook and interpretation. There is a fine line in Arnold's argument that can be used or abused for and against nationalism, for and against religion, for and against liberalism, etc. but left me with a general sense of puzzlement about whether any of Arnold's points had actually carried any momentum other than to promote the ever-so-wishy-washy phrase of "Sweetness and Light"?

"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. If it were not for this purging effect wrought upon our minds by culture, the whole world, the future as well as the present, would inevitably belong to the Philistines. The people who believe most that our greatness and welfare are proved by our being very rich, and who most give their lives and thoughts to becoming rich, are just the very people whom we call the Philistines. Culture says: "Consider these people, then, their way of life, their habits, their manners, the very tones of their voice; look at them attentively; observe the literature they read, the things which give them pleasure, the words which come forth out of their mouths, the thoughts which make the furniture of their minds; would any amount of wealth be worth having with the condition that one was to become just like these people by having it?"

By the end of the book, I was left craving for a more modern and more scientific approach to dissecting "culture" for all that it means, because while Arnold was (and to some extent still seems to be) celebrated for his efforts on defining culture, his efforts are limited to his own personal views with little to show any credentials of research or actual knowledge of society, history, or any other fields remotely relating to what we would now class as sociology, cultural studies, anthropology, etc.

Nevertheless, if you're looking to dig into the mindset of a high-Victorian Englishman, Culture and Anarchy does make for an entertaining, tho slightly painful visit.

[E. G. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Abbreviations
Introduction
Note on the Text
Select Bibliography
A Chronology of Matthew Arnold

--Culture and Anarchy

Appendix: Henry Sidgwick, 'The Prophet of Culture'
Explanatory Notes

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Victorian Age was predominantly an age of social interests and practical ideals. It was an age of the advancement of democracy, keeping pace with the expansion of science. It was also an age of great enlargement of ever widening vistas and intense activities in commerce, finance and industry.

Science was evolving bit by bit and people began to have confidence in the fact that with the help of science they were sure to advance towards an ideal state of society. In effect, in the Victorian age men added far more to their positive knowledge of themselves and the universe than their forefathers had done since the beginning of the Christian era.

The age witnessed a brutal skirmish between religion and science in which the latter gave a severe jolt to the former. Science, disseminated by Darwin and Huxley called in question the many axioms in the Bible and defied man's creation on the earth as was thought by the religious fathers. Spiritual disorder, skepticism and uncertainty were the natural outcome of such a quandary, and men like Arnold found themselves:

Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born,
With nowhere yet to rest my head,
Like these, on earth I wait forlorn.
Their faith, my tears, the world deride—
I come to shed them at their side.….

The finest expression of the forfeiture of faith in contemporary society found its expression in ‘Dover Beach’. The abysmal misperception caused by the encounter between science and faith, between advancing materialism and retreating, Christianity and purposelessness of his people finds expression in Arnold’s poems.

In ‘Dover Beach’ he regrets the loss of faith and peace of mind in the concluding lines:

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night….

‘Culture and Anarchy’ is a social and political censure of England at the time of the Second Reform Bill of 1867. The Reform Bill of 1867 enfranchised the working men in the towns and practically doubled the electorate.

There were mass activisms preceding the passage of the Reform Bill but Arnold unlike Carlyle believed that anarchy was not quite imminent. Arnold had sympathy with the democratic movement. He believed that in due course democracy was bound to come to England. However, his main concern was that this changeover to democracy should occur without the annihilation of the entire social fabric.

This was not possible if men did what they liked. Culture would be in danger if a person began to put in practice 'his right to march where he likes, meet where he likes, hoot as he likes, threaten as he likes, smash as he likes’. Culture was in but doing good to society and anarchy was its very negation.

Arnold believed in the march of democratic movement, but he wished that the initiation of democracy might not destroy the social edifice. Like Wordsworth he was against unchartered freedom.

He supported a 'firm state power' to hold anarchic and destructive tendencies under control. Arnold said that if their individualism was not to sweep them into anarchy.

The English must modify their attitude towards public authority. To quote Arnold, "They must acquire the notion, so familiar on the continent and to contiquity, of the State-the nation in its collective and corporate character, entrusted with stringent powers for the general advantage, and controlling in- dividual wills in the name of an interest wider than that of individuals."

Arnold carried on the work of Carlyle and Ruskin since like them, he also condemned materialism, national narrowness, smugness, parochialism of mind and money-mindedness.

Arnold separated Victorian society into three classes: The Barbarians, meaning the gentry; the Philistines, meaning the middle classes; and the Populace, meaning the lower classes. Arnold was cautious to point out, that there existed in all three classes many "aliens" as he called them, whose principal distinguishing trait was their humanity, and not dependence on abstract machinery.

The root inaccuracy of public opinion, he thought, was its faith in mere machinery. Coal and iron were machinery; a democratic suffrage was machinery: these things were means to an end. To be active about ‘means’ and impertinent of ‘ends’ was the quintessence of 'anarchy' and the renunciation of culture.

Arnold saw more unmistakably than Ruskin, Caryle and Tennyson the glitches created for the Victorian world by the development of Science and new knowledge and the spread of the democratic movement.

Arnold's social message was belief in 'culture' which stood for open-mindedness, delight in ideas, alertness in entertaining new points of view, and inclination to examine life repetitively in the light of new postulates.

Whenever Arnold found his countrymen under the dominance of narrow ideals, he came with 'Culture', the magic word of liberation.

In all his prose writings he attacked the bigotry and smugness of Philistines or the British middle class.

A classic!!

[Leslie Wexler · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't know where to even begin with this book. It is glorious and meaningful, useful, worthy and important - and it is also horrifying in its use of elitist rhetoric (we're here to perfect ourselves, didn't you know? and that's possible through cultural education! Perfection!), its colonial project (where an "epoch of expansion" is related not just to consciousness, but gets tacked on to a middle class progress narrative), not to mention the false parallels it draws between Jewish and Greek culture simply to explain a kind of erroneous genealogy for his of method for critical thinking. However, overlooking these and many other thoughts, you can tease out of Arnold's ideas of sweetness and lightness something truly akin and of personal affirmation to every student of the Liberal Arts. Arts students need books like Culture and Anarchy, because in spite of its flaws (which fortunately we can have a little free play of imagination with regards to), too many Arts students are at a loss usually to know why they do what they do, and why what they do is important.

I've been asked this question in many permutations and it comes in all the standard formulations, "What will you do with your PhD?" The answer is, I'm doing it. Prevailing, as Arnold calls it. Or: What is the point of large amounts of funding for the arts when the STEM disciplines are engaged in the research that society both wants and needs right now? The answer is one of preservation and resistance. And these are the answers Arnold gives any human being that reads his ideas. There are other worldviews out there then simply being Marx's "appendage to the machine", other ideas then the once handed to us in advertisements and marketing ploys, the good life may not be built on the foundation of wealth, wealth may be a foundation of undeserved privilege, which begs the question, who is deserving? Is wealth the prime mover? Does it provide the good life you imagine? We know the truth to these answers, but live our lives in a lie that labours towards that goal regardless. We knowingly choose the lie, everyday. Why? It is important for someone to ask even these preliminary and basic questions and to think about and believe in the importance of speaking multiple points of view, self-reflexivity, and critical reflection - meaning query anything you find in a static position within yourself, and if/once you do - in that moment - you open in that moment your personal truth out into the field of personal truths. Arnold believes this to be the sweetness and the lightness of being a person of "culture" or critical inquiry (in many of the formulations). When you take up the nuggets within Arnold, you can see that he is a man who stands against objectification, commodification, and forgetfulness as our dominant cultural identity, and rather at times seems to plead for a greater engagement with what it means to be human, connected to humanity, a more "perfect" in his words being.

I wonder why when undergrads enter the first year English LIterature courses they are not immediately exposed to the method (if not Arnold's writings) for how critical thinking works. What is critical thinking and how does it work is probably the first thing any 100 level class should engage. Arnold provides some good models for how "free play of the imagination" enters personal praxis.

[Mir · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reason -- "Sweetness and Light" -- Culture -- Perfection -- for Arnold these terms are nearly synonymous, and all underlie the same central claim: the cause of disorder is both identifiable and curable. Arnold's goal here is not to propose a specific program of reform but, as he says in Democracy, to "invite impartial reflections." While Arnold does not precisely live up to his own asserted impartiality, his essay does seem constructed to persuade rather than to argue. This results from a combination of its winning tone and abstract sentiments, which, though not conclusive in the sense required by formal debate are both clearly formulated and thought-provoking. Arnold's ideas have a complexity which defies easy categorization and prevents them from being dismissed without consideration, even by those who do not accept them.

Despite the balance implied in his title, the emphasis in Culture and Anarchy is primarily on the the former. In fact, the definition of culture is his first topic of argument. He poses three question concerning culture: "What is it? What good can it do? What is our special need of it?" (57). He begins by presenting what he describes as the prevailing reaction to the term, citing a speech by Liberal politician Bright:

"People will talk about what they call culture!... by which they mean a smattering of the two dead languages of Latin and Greek." And he went on to remark... how poor a thing this culture is, how little good it can do to the world... Said Mr Frederick Harrison, "Perhaps the silliest cant of the day is the cant about culture. Culture is a desirable quality in a critic of new books, and sits well on a professor of belles-lettres; but as applied to politics, it means simply a turn for small fault-finding, love of selfish ease, and indecision in action." (55)

Arnold asserts a far broader and more positive definition of culture, rooting it in "a study of perfection".

[Hal Johnson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Too much culture, not enough anarchy.

[Yngvild · Rating 5 out of 5]

When it comes to pure malicious wit, nobody beats Matthew Arnold, not even Jonathan Swift. The six short essays in Culture and Anarchy would have long passed out of print if they were not such fun. The first three essays take aim at all segments of society: the working, middle and aristocratic classes; leftwing, centrist and rightwing politicians; England, Europe and America; Nonconformists and conformists.

Evidently, even today, some people are sulky about Arnold’s poison-dipped sword, but he gores all oxen. Eton really does combine teaching with running a boarding house; groups that withdraw from mainstream society do tend to both become extremist and to push the mainstream towards extremist positions they did not formally hold.

Where Arnold becomes controversial is in his insistence that the balance among people of his day was too far towards acting over thinking. He explicitly complained that legislators in England threw petty rules at every situation in lieu of thinking through the long-term effects of such legislation. His primary example is food subsidies, which he claims rarely benefit the intended recipients. He insists that his preferred emphasis on thinking over acting, by which he obviously means more a genial composure and an intelligent, informed approach, is not “effeminate”, but suitable for a manly man.

So far, we can follow him without argument, but Arnold offers no guidelines as to where the proper balance between thinking and doing are, and he assumes in one essay that political actors are well meaning but ignorant, while pointing out in another that cynical politicians frequently pull the wool over the eyes of an ill-informed populace. Arnold wanted to educate the population, rather than provide direct subsidies, in the belief that this would enable them to take informed control their own lives and provide a better long-term outcome.

I quote a sentence from Culture and Anarchy with some trepidation. Arnold makes his case on each issue by representing each point of view in the best light, and then comparing and reconciling them. That makes it easy to misrepresent his position by selectively quoting only one of the arguments he presents. The pity is that, having shown a good deal of compassion for the underprivileged, he throws it all away in his conclusion.

But for us,--who believe in right reason, in the duty and possibility of extricating and elevating our best self, in the progress of humanity towards perfection,--for us the framework of society, that theatre on which this august drama has to unroll itself, is sacred; and whoever administers it, and however we may seek to remove them from the tenure of administration, yet, while they administer, we steadily and with undivided heart support them in repressing anarchy and disorder; because without order there can be no society, and without society there can be no human perfection. – Culture and Anarchy, Matthew Arnold (1867-1869)

[Marina]

I don't know how to rate this. There is good writing and very intelligent ideas (regarding culture), but they are overshadowed by the alarming conservatism of it all (the middle class with their tea rooms, disgusting!) and silly concepts (light, sweetness?). Also, too much love for the Establishment and Academies. It just amazes me that someone who is apparently so intelligent can say things like everybody is either Barbarians, Philistines or Populace except for men of culture, who are above class identification and are simply "men". What the fuck.

[Lichella · Rating 1 out of 5]

Literally couldn't read more than 5 pages at a time without losing track, and even within those 5 pages kept getting distracted. 1/5 would not recommend, also still only have a very vague sense of what it was about.

[Adrian Colesberry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Arnold's idea of culture could not be less in vogue these days. As it is always salutary to read the out-of-vogue, I strongly recommend this book to everyone. Today, culture is used to mean what used to be called society or even traditional society. This entire book is Arnold's bid for culture to mean the collection of all that is best and perfect in the world and the agreed-upon commitment to develop that perfection even further, an idea that today we can only weakly express with the word civilization.
The important ethic of showing tolerance towards individual human beings within a society has been democratized to the cover a variety of areas where tolerance starts clashing with what you'd hope would be higher values. One place where Western values have clashed with tolerance has been female circumcision. Tolerance would dictate that medically safe genital mutilation should be allowed in another culture (used in the non-Arnoldian sense). In this case, a Sudenese family in a hospital in New York City should have the option of asking a doctor to remove their newborn's clitoris just like they could have asked the same doctor to remove their newborn's foreskin.
Feminists cry foul though, seeing the practice as barbaric and misogynist. Many years of intervention have been specifically non-tolerant of the societies that practice it.
In a subplot, the worldwide anti-HIV effort has introduced male circumcision in parts of Africa where it had never been practiced before (in an effort to control the virus), producing a three-ring circus where one group of Westerners is going over to Africa telling people not to cut the genitals of women, another group of Westerners is going over to Africa telling people to start cutting the genitals of men and the Westerners who stay home are earnestly congratulating themselves on being so tolerant to their fellow human beings and on equally valuing all the wonderful rainbow of cultures that make up the world.
At such points, a judgment must be made and we should probably pay more attention to Arnold's idea of a higher goal for culture, his notion of culture as a collection of best practices, one of those best practices being tolerance of course, but that's not the only value in there.

[Jordan B Cooper · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite an interesting read. Arnold responds to the challenges of the Industrial Revolution with a defense of culture.

[Tobi ﾄﾋﾞ · Rating 2 out of 5]

ok bro

[Kaitlyn Connell · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel like I would have been more open to this text had Arnold clarified his terminology at the beginning. As I approached the end of the text, I felt that I was introduced to the definitions of “Hellenism and Hebraism,” “sweetness and light,” and so forth a little too late in the text. Maybe that is a fault of my edition, and maybe it isn’t.

Some good ideas towards the end about how certain in/actions vary per generation and the needs of that generation.

Probably would have had more time to dissect if it wasn’t for my MA exam and the very last text I read.

[Fran]

gigantic galaxy brain is reading this as a pro-choice text. pp. 130

to bring people into the world, when one cannot afford to keep them and oneself decently and not too precariously, or to bring more of them into the world than one can afford to keep thus, is, whatever The Times and Mr. Robert Buchanan may say, by no means an accomplishment of the divine will or a fulfilment of Nature's simplest laws, but is just as wrong, just as contrary to reason and the will of God, as for a man to have horses, or carriages, or pictures, when he cannot afford them, or to have more of them than he can afford; and that, in the one case as in the other, the larger the scale on which the violation of reason's laws is practised, and the longer it is persisted in, the greater must be the confusion and final trouble.

[Henry Heading · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alot of interesting ideas in this, i can't sympathise with the great focus on religion, being a atheist, but the idea of culture and Hebraism and Hellenism being conflicting and balancing cultural waves is a interesting concept to explain moral judgements and norms within society.

[Christian Schueller · Rating 2 out of 5]

fuck this fucking piece of shit

[feneo · Rating 1 out of 5]

sure. what the hell

[mery · Rating 2 out of 5]

lo q tú digas...

[Afeefah]

uni read

[Cooper Ackerly · Rating 4 out of 5]

As an American I feel bound to complain about Arnold’s not having read the Federalist Papers. (His commentary is characteristically both acute and at times profoundly naive.)

[David Warner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Is Matthew Arnold's 'Culture and Anarchy', with its Victorian prolixity and Anglican ethos, still relevant today? The answer, in our atomised and multicultural age, is a partial Yes, not because the original historical context is directly relevant, but because his criticisms of liberal, industrial society are still valid, even if his philosophical principles remain, as in his day, questionable.
Arnold's central proposition is that culture is the source of all true authority, and that this culture is, adopting Swift's phrase, made up of 'sweetness and light', that is beauty and intelligence. It is this sweetness and light that Arnold deemed insufficient in the society of mid-Victorian England, and indeed in all societies, including our contemporary own, where the focus is upon mechanistic processes and not the ends to which these should be directed, ends that for Arnold are the perfectibility of the individual best self as member of a society itself moving towards perfection though the use of right reason in pursuit of what is beautiful and therefore true.
After Heine, Arnold differentiates society not by social class determined by materialist function in the economic means of production, but by heritable position dependent upon wealth and the cultural status that provides, leading to the division of people into three observable groups: the Barbarians, who conform to the English-Germanic aristocracy; the Philistines, who are the industrious middle class; and the Populace, who make up the working class. This tripartite division therefore accords with other socio-economic classifications, but is culturally not economically derived, and, importantly, can be transcended by the individual, since such status only represents what Arnold calls the ordinary self and not the best self that can be attained if one rejects the pursuit of the material and instead cultivates the beautiful and the intelligent, that which is sweetness and light. Arnold rejects dialectical materialism, but retains the tenets of Hegelian dialecticism and teleology, seeking the perfectibility of man in mental processes pursued through cultural discipline, while also rejecting Carlyle's contemporary, intellectual Toryism of an innate aristocracy of talent, instead postulating that as the best self can only be obtained in a society that itself is the corporate manifestation of our best selves, where everyone is capable of attaining sweetness and light, regardless of their socio-economic relation, we can only become our best self if all others can similarly attain their best selves in what Arnold envisages as a truely equal, although not egalitarian, society.
Matthew Arnold consistently iterates that his social vision is a liberal one, but it is a liberalism that rejects utilitarianism, industrialisation, at least in so far it is an end in itself, and concepts of freedom that are based upon abstract theories of rights and which ignore the primary importance of duty, his instead being based upon the individual seeking through reading and disinterested observation what is beautiful and intelligent and what tends to human perfection, both individual and social. However, such a social and educative vision of culture ignores the real differences in human intellectual acuity and the wide disparities in educational and economic opportunities to be found across all societies, and, is that of an ironically self-defined Philistine who has escaped his Philistinism through membership of an elitist culture that is very much that of the affluent and educated, upper middle class, and is, whatever his aspirations for it, a culture that cannot be separated from his socio-economic class and the cultural privileges that ensue. Ironically, in his efforts to try to differentiate culture from materialism, Arnold inadvertently exemplifies how much what is defined as culture is materially derived.
Just as much as his epistemology is Hegelian, so is his theory of the State. Arnold regards the State as the guarantor of culture, while it is culture which provides the authority for the State as the corporate entity of the best selves of the nation. He conceives of the State as not only a higher body above the partisan interests of the different social classes, which are only the group manifestations of the ordinary selves of their constituent members, so rejecting Marxist and socialist materialism, but also, as the collective embodiment of the best selves of the population, as an ultimate, disinterested adjudicating body above the individual and with responsibility for both maintaining order and for curbing the excesses of a selfish individualism that Arnold characterised as anarchy. Arnold rejects the minimalist State of laissez-faire liberalism, and in his concern for social deprivation, education, and the raising up of the poorest to a higher culture and aesthetics, prefigures the Bismarckian social state of Imperial Germany and the welfare states of the twentieth century. However, in so doing he ignores the dangers arising from State corporatism and excessive state power over the individual, particularly as he discards the idea of human rights as too abstract and individualist, and fails to recognise that the State itself could develop in an anti-cultural manner as just a corporate projection of the ordinary selves of which he complained.
Of course, as he rejected democracy as a system of government - these essays were stimulated by the debates surrounding the 1867 Second Reform Act - which was to his mind merely government by the Populace as a partisan, social class, it could be argued that the State's manifold later failures were not its own, but due to the ordinary selves of its members and their failure to develop the culture which would give them their best selves and the proper authority for the State. And yet, what Arnold conceives in these essays as the ideal State looks very much like the Platonic model of government by philosopher-kings, that is by the educated and leisurely elite of which Arnold considered himself a distinguished member, guided by Hegelian dialecticism, and given authority by its own elite culture, which carried with it the intendant risks of descent into corporatism and extremism, as seen in the last century, and as dissected by Karl Popper in 'The Open Society and its Enemies', and into which we are on the verge of falling in our own age through the triumph of atomistic globalism and ideological conformism.
While Arnold as social critic was perceptive about many of the failings of industrial society, his visions of the perfectibility of humankind and the ideal of the State were based upon the Platonism and Hegelism that was to evolve into the perverted extremes of fascism, communism, and other totalitarianisms, the intellectual, cultural, and social origins of which Hannah Arendt later explored, and which were to almost destroy the open societies that provided the only possibility of maintaining the culture that Arnold admired, and which only survived through the efforts of the very industrial and democratic societies he deplored. In the end, for all his idealism of sweetness and light, Arnold was a socially authoritarian elitist with no interest in individual freedom and human rights, and too concerned with the perpetuation of rule by people of his cultural and intellectual status, at the expense of the mass, democratic population. Like many Victorian thinkers, he was as much an opponent of democracy as many later idealists, who unintentionally paved the way for political extremism and totalitarianism, because when it was found that the people they could or would not understand would not conform to the ideals they held as manifestly true, it was determined that they must be coerced or oppressed into conformity - into becoming their better selves for their own and the social good - on the grounds that those who held social and political power and controlled the mechanisms of the State and media were the best determinants of what culture is, what right thinking should be, and how these should be asserted and defended against criticism and popular opposition.
To be fair to Arnold, in his distinction between Hebraism and Hellenism, he does explore the dangers of narrow thinking and the limitations of moral obedience, but he does so through the prism of nineteenth century liberal Anglicanism and principally in cultural terms, and so is unable to make the intellectual leap required to understand what classical political liberalism could be, how it could serve as the protector of the individual and his internally derived values, and how its ideas could serve as the basis of an open, diverse, and instructive (but not didactic) culture, as in the later ideas of Isiaih Berlin, with his definition of positive and negative liberalism, his analogy of the hedgehog and the fox, and in his defence of pluralism. But Arnold was not a political theorist, and neither was he a democrat nor pluralist, regarding the perfectibility of man as only possible through adherence to established religion and Christian culture, particularly that engendered by the Church of England, so that one often feels the image of what Matthew Arnold regarded as exemplar of the best self was what he saw when looking in his mirror, even when it is clear his cultural idealism was politically impracticable and as much flawed as his cultural criticism was perceptive.
However, what Arnold did clearly delineate, after Augustine of Hippo, was the categorical difference between means and ends, and how the confusion between the two in a society in which economic development, technical innovation, and free trade were becoming ends in themselves, and in which behaviours and beliefs were becoming increasingly mechanised and determined by the needs of material advancement, was leading to obliviation of the truth that these were not the objects of society, but only the means by which society could obtain its ends: the cultural and intellectual perfection of its members as their better selves within a culturally, not materially, derived better society.
Similarly in his exegesis, particularly of the Pauline Epistles, later expanded upon in 'St Paul and Protestantism', Arnold sought through his understanding of Greek thought, and the Hellenistic context within which Paul wrote, to reveal how these should not be read dogmatically, as instructions to be obeyed, but as spiritual and metaphysical texts through which the Christian could attain true understanding of the meaning of Christ's life and teachings. In this way, Arnold explains how the Resurrection of the believer is not a physical process undergone after death as reward for obedience and orthopraxis, but a spiritual, internal rebirthing obtained in life through personal reasoning. Just as with culture, so the individual through reason and understanding should first discover his faith within himself, and then, just as culture attained from within the individual, as his best self, should lead towards the perfectibility of not the individual alone, but the totality of society of which the collective best selves were its manifestation, so the faith of the best self of the believer brought about by right reason, should become manifest in communal worship. For Arnold, while both culture and faith had their origins in individual, subjective mental processes, they only had validity when objectivised as part of the collective, that is the culturally derived society and the faithfully formed Church, two interconnected and interdependent constructs of the same intelligibility and beauty, since, as with the Greeks, for Arnold, culture and religion, having the same origins, were but different emanations of the same things: sweetness and light. From this, it follows that the idealised, liberal Anglicanism that he propounded was the collective realisation of the best selves of believers, in the same way the State was the ultimate, cultural realisation of the best selves of the people.
Despite his often ironic characterisation as such, Matthew Arnold was not a prophet, and as a poet he never produced an oeuvre sufficient to rank him amongst the greats, but he was a first class cultural and social critic, and it as this he deserves to be read today. These essays, controversial then, and still today, have many faults, but that is because Arnold was willing to put his head above the parapet and make a claim for culture as the foundation of all authority and social values at a time of rapid industrialisation and class antagonism, and to see in culture the single binding force of a truly equal society dedicated to the common and interconnected individual good to be found in intelligence, intelligibility, and beauty. He was wrong about the benign role of the State and did not predict the deleterious cultural impact of welfarism, and his vision was elitist and overtly Anglican, but by criticism of the materialism of his age, and of subsequent ages, and of the atomisation of excessive individualism and its concomitant subjectivism, he made in 'Culture and Anarchy' an impressive argument for the social worth of a high culture accessible to all through personal internal development, intellectual and ascetic, and put forward a claim for the importance of objectivity and cultural cohesion that is as warranted now as much as it was in his age.

[Christopher Rush · Rating 5 out of 5]

Indeed, yes. Though this is somewhat different from what you think it is going to be, based on your limited knowledge for what Arnold is arguing, and thus one could find it somewhat disappointing, but it should not be disappointing. What was somewhat surprising was Arnold's great phrase "the best of what's been thought and said" appears so soon in the book, in the preface, and then is never mentioned again. Arnold more often mentions the importance of letting one's reason play freely over issues and ideas. This is one of those classics that is much easier to understand when one actually reads it. The introduction by the no-doubt well-meaning editor is a terrible pain, despite its desire to inform and elucidate. It doesn't help much at all; it only fosters tedium. Once one actually gets into Arnold's work, clarity and enthusiasm replace the tedium, even in the sections dominated by the kairotic issues and people so pressing on Arnold no longer (as) pertinent today. Fortunately, the eternal ideas and arguments Arnold propounds shine through the temporal consternations for all but the least attentive reader. The inclusion of Sidgwick's critical article at the end of the book is not as helpful as the Oxford editorial team probably thought it would be. Sidgwick's article is against an earlier, shorter essay by Arnold. Culture and Anarchy is a response to Sidgwick's criticism of Arnold's earlier work. So reading Culture and Anarchy before Sidgwick's article is backwards, since we are reading Arnold's responses before knowing Sidgwick's criticisms. Reading Sidgwick's criticisms after Arnold's responses shifts the argumentative balance more in Sidgwick's favor than is appropriate. If our friends at Oxford really wanted to be helpful, they would have begun with Arnold's culture and religion essay, followed by Sidgwick's response, then finishing with Culture and Anarchy. Maybe that's a job for our friends at Norton to do, someday.

I don't recall if Arnold ever actually uses the word "anarchy." Like Alan Moore after him (and just about every educated person before him), Arnold doesn't imply "chaos" with his discussion of "anarchy" (without ever using the word directly except perhaps twice) - what is anarchy to Arnold is "everyone having the freedom to do what he wants, whenever he wants to do it." That is the anarchy opposed to culture. Culture and religion are closely intertwined. For those who know Arnold only through "Dover Beach," Arnold comes as far more in favor of religion (especially established religion) than he does in "Dover Beach," and religion is a crucial factor in a quality culture. This is still a great book. Despite the dominance of Victorian characters and issues, this is still a necessary and helpful book and will be until reason and the will of God prevail.

[Peter Ellwood · Rating 3 out of 5]

An intriguing glimpse into the working of the Victorian mind. Culture and Anarchy is often quoted as an iconic, milestone statement of Victorian intellectual development – any self-respecting intellectual, keen to improve his/her mind, has no choice but to read it really. Matthew Arnold’s thinking is still visible in the contemporary approach to higher education, especially the teaching of the humanities. And the view that the essence of “culture” should be seen as the pursuit of self-improvement, “sweetness and light”, is at the very centre of his view of the world: the act of reading ”Culture and Anarchy” is presumably a tiny step towards this perfection.

Just as well, because it’s quite hard work. MA’s prose flows like a flood tide it is true, helped along by his quiet sense of humour here and there. But for me, that’s where it ended. I’ve only used the word “orotund” once before in my life, so he is in exalted company. Still, orotund he is. Consider this:

“The great men of culture are those who have had a passion for diffusing, for making prevail, for carrying from one end of society to the other, the best knowledge, the best ideas of their time; who have laboured to divest knowledge of all that was harsh, uncouth, difficult, abstract, professional, exclusive; to humanise it, to make it efficient outside the clique of the cultivated and learned, yet still remaining the best knowledge and thought of the time, and a true source, therefore, of sweetness and light”.

Couldn’t have put it more verbosely myself. But, possibly, Matthew Arnold could, as there are many more pages with even more rambling sentences.

At the same time, it represents an intriguing, real-time insight into Victorian confidence and expansiveness. If MA takes 150 pages to express ideas that might have been dealt with in two or three in the Economist, it’s partly because of an overwhelming confidence that he had something to say; the something-to-say also being an expression of England’s burgeoning self-belief: indeed, he makes that connection explicitly at various points. It’s not just an account of history in the making, it is history in the making.

[Derek L. · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was an interesting book to read, despite my final rating.

It is interesting because readers see an interesting time in England's history. At the time, Matthew Arnold believed that the assertion of personal liberty was a crucial part of English life and brought society closer. This can even be seen today in the twenty-first century, in the United States. I agree with this belief.

There were other things that resonated with me and are also a part of my personal beliefs. He talks about lifelong learning in various places throughout the text, especially the first chapter. Continuous, consistent learning is something I am very passionate about. This is why I enjoy reading books like Arnold's.

Further, I also completely stand with Arnold's assertion that perfection is impossible to attain. It is something we develop, while enjoying the freedom of doing what we want to do, while acknowledging the consequences that come with our freedom and the actions we commit.

While I did agree with a lot of what Arnold was saying in these essays, the main reason why this gets such a low rating is primarily driven by Arnold's writing style. While I don't find much difficulty in reading Victorian literature, I did find these essays to be rather dry and lacking. While the writing style of the time can sometimes be categorized as dry, I have never read nonfiction printed during that time period. So I can understand why the text reads like it does.

Overall I did learn something from this collection of essays but it definitely wouldn't be categorized as my favorite work of non-fiction.

[Fred R · Rating 4 out of 5]

Many of the specific categories and oppositions he sets up don't seem to hold water, but I wholeheartedly endorse the general thrust of the argument. Of every human product it can be asked: "does this build up civilization, or tear it down?"

To give you a sense of his thought processes:

"So all our fellow-men, in the East of London and elsewhere, we must take along with us in the progress towards perfection, if we ourselves really, as we profess, want to be perfect; and we must not let the worship of any fetish, any machinery, such as manufactures or population - which are not, like perfection, absolute goods in themselves, though we think them so, - create for us such a multitude of miserable, sunken, and ignorant human beings, that to carry them all along with us is impossible, and perforce they must for the most party be left by us in their degradation in wretchedness."

[Michael Percy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had heard others speak of this book as if it were a cult classic. Any wonder. There are so many things going on in this work. I am still trying to see where Matthew Arnold fits in with the likes of Edmund Burke, John Stuart Mill, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, and Herbert Spencer. He was a professor of poetry by profession, and his niece, Mrs Humphrey Ward, became a metonym for a conservative wowser. So he was hardly a John Stuart Mill, yet he was also rather short of being a Herbert Spencer. He seemed to be the reverse of a modern Australian Liberal (not liberal) - he did not support free trade but looked to the cultural elite, while remaining socially conservative. The brief introduction eludes to the lack of definitions in the work, and this is supported by a critique of the work by Henry Sidgwick entitled The Prophet of Culture (provided as an appendix). Indubitably, the two were friends, but with some rather major philosophical differences. There are extensive notes and these are important due to the number of then-contemporary social, political, cultural, and religious debates (as indicated by the list of important thinkers above) that would be lost on most modern readers (or me, at least). These are rather important to understanding the context but I suspect the different disciplinary groups did not necessarily cross paths in their intellectual outputs. For my own memory, it is useful to outline some of Arnold's key ideas. First, culture is the seeking (as opposed to achieving) perfection in the pursuit of reason and the will of God. The phrase "sweetness and light" is used by Arnold to refer to the pursuit of beauty (in the Hellenistic sense) and light as intellect. Sidgwick counters with "fire and strength" as being more important to improving society (referring, in particular, to religion). Arnold navigates two approaches to understanding culture (albeit somewhat difficult to articulate a precise definition of either) as Hebraising (referring to the Hebrew penchant for religious discipline) versus Hellenism (referring to the Ancient Greek aesthetic and penchant for reason). Arnold brings in the idea of class here (something completely overlooked by many modern works that assume the myth of egalitarianism in contemporary society is not a myth at all), and names the classes the Barbarians (the aristocracy), the Philistines (the middle class) and the Populace (the working class). Given the book was published in 1869, the "Populace" was still a few decades away from any formal political power, and class-based rioting was emerging as a problem for the likes of Burke (who had issues with the Lockean and Rousseauian conceptions of the social contract. Indeed, Arnold was a form of anti-Jacobin). Arnold was closer to Hobbesian support for a strong State, but tempered by the idea that representatives of each class should strive to represent their ideal best selves (as a class rather than individuals), and the idea of the State was to enable such striving for social and political perfection. There were a few snippets that drew lines where the State should and should not intervene, relating to Nonconformism and antidisestablishmentarianism (I always wanted to use that word - but I must qualify, it relates to then-contemporary debates over the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland [refer to the Irish Church Act 1869], rather than the Church of England - but I had to use the word!) rather than intervening to protect the poor (some Malthusian debate was definitely going on at this time in history). Nevertheless, Arnold was opposed to government "control for control's sake" (p. 170) over education policy, and preferred the Continental approaches to education that had clear strategic objectives rather than simply government control. Sidgwick puts some of this confusion to rest - he is by no means a fan of this particular piece of Arnold's work but empathises with his cause to strengthen society by increasing its culture. Here, Sidgwick's essay does a great service to Arnold's theme, and the two works together are important. Sidgwick (p. 172) surmises that Arnold "wishes for reconciliation of antagonisms" - be these Hebraism versus Hellenism, class differences, or culture and religion (or sweetness and light versus fire and strength) - in an effort to improve society. Without Sidgwick's contribution, it would be easy to miss Arnold's point. But that does not make the work of any less value. Some of these statements have been made by others (including the introduction), and Arnold's belief in the "law of perfection" reminds me of a scene from The Last Samurai where Tom Cruise narrates: "From the moment they wake they devote themselves to the perfection of whatever they pursue". This was a difficult read. Not like Sir Walter Scott's work where one can readily get bogged down in Gaelic dialogue, but because numerous reference to the notes (there are as many notes as pages) are necessary to understand the context, and there is so much jam-packed in this otherwise short essay, that it takes a while to sink in. While that should not diminish the importance of the work, if the attitude to difficult works today is anything to go by - where we are routinely told by lazy egoists (as opposed to egotists) if we cannot explain something to a three year-old child we don't understand it ourselves - then Arnold is amiss. But he was so close to being a futurist that this work ought to be more widely read, not as a cult classic (which arguably it deserves to be), but because we are reaching the culmination-point Arnold seemed to warn about,-
should we ever relegate "sweetness and light" to "fire and strength".

[Derek Kreider · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was tough to get through and didn't seem overall applicable. He seems to equate culture with the State and sees that as good. The Constantinian shift was good to him. He criticzes Spurgeon for being a hebraist. Two interesting things were his critique towards the end of using the Bible as a manual and how it's foolish to use the Bible for moral laws, like Levirite marriage. We think it's absurd. The other interesting thing was him saying that things like freedom are a means, but that we often make these things the ends we pursue.

[Alberto · Rating 2 out of 5]

Unreadable intellectual onanism. "Sweetness and Light" is the kind of meaningless phrase you hope is just a poor translation from a foreign language where the phrase had actual meaning. Unfortunately, English is Arnold's native language. But this particular work is utter gibberish.

[Erling]

I found this book difficult to follow at times due to it’s close correlation with English political movements in the 19th century, which I know not much of. That being said, Arnold’s spiritual approach to culture is interesting to explore

[Megan · Rating 3 out of 5]

are you a barbarian, a philistine, or just part of the populace? read this book and find out.