Page 32 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

MATTHEW ARNOLD

led, not by their class spirit, but by a general humane spirit, by the
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love of human perfection”. This group is by no means necessarily
fixed in size. Quite the contrary: it can be expanded through state-
sponsored education.
For Arnold, the state becomes, in effect, the institutional corollary
of the concept of culture. Hence the title of the book, in which culture
is counterposed, not to material civilization, but to anarchy. If the
preservation and extension of culture is a task which devolves essentially
upon the state, then it must follow that any threat of “anarchy and
disorder” will be directed as much at culture as at the state itself:
“without order there can be no society, and without society there can
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be no human perfection”. And anarchy, Arnold is clear, emanates
from the “working class…beginning to assert and put into practice
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an Englishman’s right to do what he likes”. Arnold’s defence of culture
is conceived in organicist and anti-individualist terms suggestive of a
rejection of middle class utilitarianism closely parallel, as we shall
see, to those attempted by both classical sociology and classical
Marxism. But the critique of utilitarian culture becomes displaced,
through a similarly organicist and anti-individualist conception of
the state, into a fear of anarchy, and a corresponding faith in the
remnant, much more reminiscent of sociology, and especially of French
sociological positivism, than it is of Marxism. The Arnoldian
programme becomes, then, a programme of liberal, but not thereby
individualist, social reform.
Williams argues that the key weakness in Arnold is his inability to
explain how it is that the state might be influenced by the remnant,
rather than by the classes, so as to make it possible for it to fulfil the
cultural rôle allocated it. In short, Arnold can offer no institutional
mechanism by which the remnant might be organized. Thus the case
for the ideal state collapses into a defence of an actual state which is
in reality far from ideal. There is one obvious reply to this charge,
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though it is not one of which Arnold could have availed himself. It
could be argued that Arnold’s remnant is better understood as a social
class in its own right, rather than as an aggregate “number of aliens”, 10
and that it should therefore prove at least as capable of directing the
state, at least in particular directions, as are the Barbarians, Philistines
and Populace. Neither Arnold nor Williams contemplates this prospect.
But had either done so, it might well have provided them with an
explanation for the transparently, and increasingly, educative rôle of

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