Page 33 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

CULTURALISM

much of the business of the modern state. A problem remains, however:
understood thus—that is, as an intellectual class—the remnant would
in all probability be motivated, not by a general humane spirit, but by
their own class spirit. Such a class spirit would, of course, prove
unusually sympathetic, by comparison with those of the three main
classes, to the business of intellectual work. But there is no reason at
all to imagine it inspired by the love of human perfection. If Arnold’s
remnant has indeed proved able to direct state policy towards
deliberately “cultural” goals, in exactly the way he envisaged, then
this can have been so only because it possessed powers of organization
and interest quite specific to itself as a class. And if the remnant is
indeed as distinct a social class as this appears to suggest, then a
prima facie case, at least, exists for the proposition that its motives
are likely to be as ulterior as are those of any other major social
group.

The rise of English studies
A recognizably Arnoldian discipline of “English” slowly began to
emerge in the British Isles during the mid-late 19th century. The origins
of English criticism can actually be traced back to the late 17th and
early 18th centuries, and to the network of London clubs and coffee
houses which sustained Defoe’s Review, Steele’s Tatler, and Addison’s
Spectator (founded, respectively, in 1704, 1709 and 1711). But this
was very much a general “cultural” criticism, rather than a technical
“literary” criticism and, whatever else it might have been, it was certainly
not “academic’: neither Oxford nor Cambridge taught “English” as
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a university subject. Following Habermas, Terry Eagleton has argued
that such cultural criticisms can be understood as characteristic of
the developing liberal “public sphere”: “A polite, informed public
opinion pits itself against the arbitrary diktats of autocracy; within
the translucent space of the public sphere it is supposedly no longer
social power, privilege and tradition which confer upon individuals
the title to speak and judge, but the degree to which they are constituted
as discoursing subjects by sharing in a consensus of universal reason”. 12
This bourgeois public sphere was progressively undermined during
the 19th century, Eagleton argues, firstly by the expansion of the
literary market and the concomitant rise of an anonymous public,

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