Page 41 - Culture Society and the Media

CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 31
the community and defining his or her place within it. In England where, as
Perry Anderson has noted (see Anderson, 1969), questions concerning the
integration of the social order have more usually been the province of literary
and cultural criticism than of sociology, similar concerns have been expressed in
the tradition of cultural analysis running from Matthew Arnold to T.S.Eliot and
F.R.Leavis. Typifying this tradition has been the perception that social anarchy,
the threat of social turbulence from ‘below’, can be regarded as the consequence
of cultural anarchy defined as a condition in which the cultures of different
classes or social groups are in competition with one another rather than
coexisting, as mutually complementary parts, within a cohesively integrated
system of cultural relationships. Matthew Arnold communicates this
apprehension very nicely in his description of the ‘Hyde Park rough’, his oblique
way of referring to working class political protest:

He has no visionary schemes of revolution and transformation, though of
course he would like his class to rule, as the aristocratic class like their
class to rule, and the middle class theirs. But meanwhile our social
machine is a little out of order…. The rough has not yet quite found his
groove and settled down to his work, and so he is just asserting his personal
liberty a little, going where he likes, assembling where he likes, bawling as
he likes, hustling as he likes. Just as the rest of us,—as the country squires
in the aristocratic class, as the political dissenters in the middle class,—he
has no idea of a State, of the nation in its collective and corporate character
controlling, as government, the free swing of this or that one of its
members in the name of the higher reason of all of them, his own as well
as that of others. (Arnold, 1971, p. 65)

Writing in the aftermath of the popular agitation that had accompanied the
progress of the 1867 Reform Bill, Arnold’s fear of anarchy was a real one and he
was quite unequivocal in declaring that, when and where necessary, this threat
should be countered by the use of directly coercive means. The need that he
articulated, however, was for the formation of a ‘centre of authority’, embodied
in the state, that would reduce such occasions to a minimum by producing,
within the members of all classes, a voluntary compliance with the direction
given to social and political life by the representatives of such a ‘centre of
authority’. In doing so, and in this he was entirely typical of the mass society
tradition, Arnold responded to the political problem of social disorder by
redifining it as a cultural problem. If anarchy threatens, he argued, it is because
the mechanisms of ‘culture’—that is, of an integrative system of values, ‘the best
that has been thought and known in the world’—have broken down with the result
that different classes pursue their own interests rather than subordinating them to
a consensually agreed upon ‘centre of authority’.