Page 36 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

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Literature and society: from culturalism to cultural materialism

opposition to mechanical civilisation: ‘culture . . . has a very
important function to fulfil for mankind. And this function is
particularly important in our modern world, of which the whole
civilization is... mechanical and external, and tends constantly
to become more so’ (Arnold, 1966, pp. 48–9).
Culture is thus for Arnold a social force in opposition to
material civilisation, the equivalent, at the societal level, to his
own individual role as inspector of schools. As such, it clearly
requires embodiment in some social group or another. But Arnold
firmly rejected the pretensions to the title of guarantor of culture
of each of the three major social classes: the Barbarian aristocracy
suffers from a ‘natural inaccessibility, as children of the estab-
lished fact, to ideas’; the Philistine middle class is so preoccupied
with external civilisation that ‘not only do they not pursue sweet-
ness and light, but... even prefer... that sort of machinery of
business... which makes up [their] dismal and illiberal life’; and
the working-class Populace either aspires to follow the middle
class, or is merely degraded, ‘raw and half-developed... half-
hidden amidst its poverty and squalor’ (pp. 101–5). No class, but
rather the ‘remnant’ of the cultured within each class, what today
we might perhaps term ‘an intelligentsia’, sustains the continued
development of human culture: ‘persons who are mainly led, not
by their class spirit, but by a general humane spirit, by the love
of human perfection’ (p. 109). This group is by no means neces-
sarily fixed in size. Quite the contrary: it can be expanded through
state-sponsored education.
For Arnold, the state becomes, in effect, the institutional corol-
lary of the concept of culture. Hence the title of the book, in which
culture is counterposed not to material civilisation, but to anarchy.
If the preservation and extension of culture is a task that 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 be no human perfection’ (p. 203). And
anarchy, Arnold is clear, emanates from the ‘working class . . .
beginning to assert and put into practice an Englishman’s right to
do what he likes’ (p. 76). Arnold’s defence of culture is conceived
in organicist and anti-individualist terms suggestive of a rejection

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