Culture and Anarchy

Source: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).

Matthew Arnold, then Professor of Poetry at Oxford and a working school inspector, wrote Culture and Anarchy as a series of periodical essays in Cornhill Magazine in 1867-68, collecting them as a book in 1869 with a new preface added. The work grew out of the anxieties of the Second Reform Act period, when the 1866-67 Hyde Park riots over franchise extension and broader working-class agitation seemed to Arnold symptoms of social "anarchy." Reacting against the utilitarian individualism and laissez-faire liberalism of mid-Victorian England, and against the narrow sectarian moralism he associated with Nonconformist religion (which he called "Hebraism" run to excess), Arnold developed a program of cultural criticism aimed chiefly at England's middle and upper classes. He had already begun articulating related ideas in earlier lectures and essays, including "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time." Culture and Anarchy became his most influential and widely read prose work, entering a broader Victorian conversation about culture, class, and the state's role in an age of democratization, industrial expansion, and religious controversy, alongside contemporaries such as Carlyle and Ruskin.

Culture and Anarchy is a work of social and political criticism, not narrative, developed across a sequence of essays. Arnold opens by defining "culture" as "the 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," a study of perfection pursued through "sweetness and light" that harmonizes beauty and intelligence. Against this ideal he sets contemporary England's tendency toward "doing as one likes" and a mechanical faith in institutions, wealth, and freedom pursued as ends rather than means. He divides English society into three classes: the Barbarians (the aristocracy, marked by chivalry, manners, and outward form but little intellectual seriousness), the Philistines (the middle class, dominated by Nonconformist religion and commercial energy but narrow moral rigidity), and the Populace (the raw, still-inchoate working class, newly asserting itself politically). Arnold argues that each class is prone to "doing as one likes" and that England lacks a "best self," a center of right reason and authority, to check anarchic impulses. He contrasts "Hebraism" (moral strictness, conduct, and obedience) with "Hellenism" (spontaneity of consciousness, flexible intelligence, and seeing things as they really are), arguing English culture has overbalanced toward Hebraism. The essays culminate in an argument for the State as the organ of the nation's collective best self, and for culture as the discipline that can guide England toward a more harmonious, reasonable social order beyond class interest and sectarian dogma.

• Culture as the pursuit of perfection through the best that has been thought and said
• The conflict between Hebraism (moral conduct) and Hellenism (flexible intelligence)
• Class critique: Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace
• Anarchy versus authority and the need for a national "best self"
• Doing as one likes versus disciplined liberty
• The role of the State as guardian of right reason
• Religious Nonconformity and its cultural narrowness
• Sweetness and light as an ideal of harmonious perfection

• ◆Satirical typology — classifying English society into Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace to expose class limitations
• ◆Ironic, urbane prose style — deploying wit and repetition to needle Victorian complacency
• ◆Antithesis — pairing opposed terms like Hebraism/Hellenism and culture/anarchy to structure argument
• ◆Coined critical vocabulary — phrases like "sweetness and light" and "doing as one likes" that became lasting cultural shorthand
• ◆Allusion to classical and biblical tradition — grounding argument in Greek and Hebrew civilization
• ◆Persona of the reasonable moderate — Arnold positions himself above partisan factions to argue for disinterested critique

• ◆Barbarians, Philistines, Populace — symbolic shorthand for aristocracy, middle class, and working class and their respective limitations
• ◆Sweetness and light — symbol of the harmonious union of beauty (sweetness) and intelligence (light) that culture pursues
• ◆Hebraism and Hellenism — symbolic poles representing moral strictness versus intellectual flexibility in civilization
• ◆Hyde Park riots and "doing as one likes" — symbolic of contemporary social anarchy and the absence of disciplined authority

Culture and Anarchy shaped twentieth-century thinking about the meaning and function of "culture" itself, influencing later cultural critics from T. S. Eliot to F. R. Leavis and the Scrutiny school, who inherited Arnold's emphasis on discriminating literary judgment and the "best" tradition. Raymond Williams made Arnold a central figure in Culture and Society, using the book to trace the emergence of "culture" as a keyword in response to industrial modernity. Arnold's class typology of Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace entered general English usage, and his arguments about the State's role in cultural authority informed later debates in cultural studies, education policy, and the sociology of taste, including reactions from Marxist and postcolonial critics against his elitist assumptions.

• Thomas Carlyle — Past and Present
• John Ruskin — Unto This Last
• Matthew Arnold — Essays in Criticism
• Raymond Williams — Culture and Society, 1780-1950
• T. S. Eliot — Notes Towards the Definition of Culture
• John Stuart Mill — On Liberty

1. 1Culture and Anarchy originated as periodical essays in Cornhill Magazine before being revised into a single book in 1869.
2. 2The term "Philistine" for the culturally narrow middle class, though not coined by Arnold, was popularized in English through his use of it in this work.
3. 3Arnold wrote the book while working full-time as a government inspector of schools, a role that shaped his views on education and the state.
4. 4The phrase "sweetness and light" is often mistaken as original to Arnold but was borrowed from Jonathan Swift's The Battle of the Books.