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Contemporary Cultural Theory

(1795–1881) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), were
intimately familiar with the German debates. In Britain, as in
Germany, the concept of culture increasingly emerged as what
Williams terms ‘an abstraction and an absolute’, merging two
distinct responses: ‘first, the recognition of the practical separation
of certain moral and intellectual activities from the driven impetus
of the new kind of society; second, the emphasis of these activ-
ities, as a court of human appeal, to be set over the process of
practical social judgement and yet to offer itself as a mitigating
and rallying alternative’ (Williams, 1963, p. 17). Here, the
antithesis between culture and civilisation, as also that between
the authenticity of natural, lived experience and the mechanistic
imperatives of industrialisation, clearly attest to the pain and the
trauma of the very first industrial revolution, that which
occurred in Britain itself. This is a tradition that clearly embraced
both a radically conservative reaction against capitalist moder-
nity and a radically progressive aspiration to go beyond that
modernity. Whatever the register, however, culturalism remained
irretrievably adversarial in its relations both to capitalist indus-
trialisation and to utilitarian intellectual culture. We do not intend
to repeat here Williams’ account of the culturalist tradition as a
whole; we will instead concentrate on what seem three repre-
sentative figures: Matthew Arnold (1822–88), T.S. Eliot
(1885–1965) and F.R. Leavis (1895–1978).

Matthew Arnold
Arnold is indisputably one of the central figures in the English
culturalist tradition. He is, both theoretically and practically,
perhaps the single most important nineteenth-century progenitor
of contemporary English literature studies. The key text for our
purposes is almost certainly Culture and Anarchy, first published
in 1869. Arnold’s definitions of ‘culture’ are various: it is sweet-
ness and light, it is the best that has been thought and said, it is
essentially disinterested, it is the study of perfection, it is internal
to the human mind and general to the whole community, it is a
harmony of all the powers that make for the beauty and worth
of human nature. But, however it is defined, culture stands in

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