Understand in about 6 minutes
Arnold argues that culture, the pursuit of human perfection through sweetness and light, is the cure for an age that worships freedom and machinery over right reason.
Idea map
Mental models
Treat goods like freedom, wealth, and organisation as machinery, useful only as they serve the end of perfection, never as ends in themselves.
It gives the reader a test for any cherished institution or activity: ask what end it actually serves before prizing it.
Each class and person has an ordinary self that asserts its likings and a best self that answers to right reason; authority should rest on the latter.
It offers a way to seek a common centre of authority above competing class interests and private impulse.
Hebraism and Hellenism are rival forces that a healthy life keeps in proportion rather than letting one crowd out the other.
It encourages diagnosing whether conduct or clear thinking is being neglected, and correcting the imbalance.
Summary
Culture and Anarchy is a work of political and social criticism written as England debated franchise reform and watched street agitation. Arnold's aim is to defend culture against the charge that it is idle refinement, and to offer it instead as a serious force for setting the nation's confused life in order.
He defines culture as a study of perfection that grows out of the love of perfection and the passion for doing good. It seeks to make reason and the will of God prevail, and it carries this through a pursuit of beauty and intelligence together, which he names with Swift's phrase, the two noblest of things, sweetness and light.
Against this ideal he sets the English habit of faith in machinery. Freedom, wealth, population, industry, and religious organisation are all treated, he argues, as if they had value in and for themselves, when they are only means. The Englishman's prized impulse to do as he likes becomes, without right reason to guide it, a recipe for anarchy.
Arnold divides English society into three classes he names the Barbarians, the aristocracy with its exterior culture and love of doing as it likes; the Philistines, the energetic middle class devoted to business and a narrow religion; and the Populace, the raw working mass. No class as it stands can supply a sound centre of authority, so he locates authority instead in the best self, or right reason, which the State should embody.
The later chapters develop the contrast between Hebraism and Hellenism, two great forces whose final aim is one but whose courses differ: Hebraism drives at conduct and obedience, Hellenism at clear and flexible thinking. Arnold judges his countrymen to be over-Hebraised and in need of Hellenism, and closes by urging culture as the work of bringing the two into balance.
Key concepts
Selected Quotes
Culture is then properly described not as having its origin in curiosity, but as having its origin in the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.
The uppermost idea with Hellenism is to see things as they really are; the uppermost idea with Hebraism is conduct and obedience.
The governing idea of Hellenism is spontaneity of consciousness; that of Hebraism, strictness of conscience.
Source
Source text: Project Gutenberg edition of Culture and Anarchy by Matthew Arnold.
HTML text: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/4212/pg4212.txt
Project Gutenberg states this ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever.
The Project Gutenberg text reproduces the 1869 first edition of the essay.