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those cultural practices. For him, culture allows individuals to liberate
themselves from their class-bound perspectives. This act of liberation
could be regarded as itself an individualistic gesture, but Arnold argues
that in doing so these individuals are actually entering a new kind of
disinterested class, the aliens or remnant in Arnold s terms. For
Arnold, culture allows one to be an individual in the sense that it allows
one to escape the conformity of one s class, but ultimately he sees a unity
arising from all the individuals thus freed. The idea of the remnant thus
displays the same notion of self-willed membership in a community
separable from material conditions that we saw Schiller describing as
the aesthetic state in the conclusion of the Aesthetic Letters. Culture
therefore promotes a kind of individuation which is compatible with
entering a truly uni ed community, which is what Arnold identi es as
the true meaning of the idea of the state.
Thus through culture, each individual will independently come to the
recognition of right reason, and, on this basis, individual cultivation will
have the e ect of promoting the perfection of society as a whole, i.e. the
state. Like Kant and Schiller, Arnold stresses that the two processes are
everywhere intertwined:
the expansion of our humanity, to suit the idea of perfection which culture
forms, must be a general expansion. Perfection, as culture conceives it, is not
possible while the individual remains isolated; the individual is obliged, under
pain of being stunted and enfeebled in his own development if he disobeys, to
carry others along with him in his march towards perfection. C&A,
Thus there is the need of the state, through its establishments, to
promote the kind of culture which will lead to the cultivation that will
ultimately perfect the state itself. It is on this side of the argument for
promoting the culture of the establishments that Arnold seems to fall
into the conservatism of the common culture paradigm that Baldick
and Gra criticize, the idea that the subjectivity of the individual should
be fully congruent with the traditional collective culture of the society.
However, what distinguishes his account of culture in Culture and Anarchy
from a reactionary appeal to the common culture of the cultural nation
is that Arnold s culture is only proleptically common culture. In the
same way that the minority that Mill sought to preserve in On Liberty
and Representative Government was an educated one, so too the culture that
Arnold exalts is, at the time he writes, minority culture, in the sense that
only an educated minority of people possess it, namely, the aliens.
Arnold believes that what he calls culture is destined to become com-
Matthew Arnold on culture and the state
mon because it is universal, based on right reason, but it remains at his
historical moment, minority culture.
:
Granted Arnold s premises, his attempt to present a progressive model
of establishment culture is theoretically coherent. Where he opens
himself to charges of bad-faith cultural conservatism is not in Culture and
Anarchy itself, but in the literary absolutism of the account of the literary
touchstones in The Study of Poetry ( ). The same issue is at stake,
namely, how to reconcile the progressive claims made for poetry with
the idea of an established literary tradition. But the reason Arnold is
unable to reconcile these two element successfully here is that he refuses
to make an inclusive theoretical case for the aesthetic sphere, like
Schiller, or to make a theoretical case for traditionalism, like Coleridge.
Arnold presupposes the justi cations he should be arguing for, and, as a
consequence, appears to express an arbitrary valuation of tradition for
its own sake.
What is at stake in Arnold s untheoretical account of the touchstones
is not the basic issue of the con ict between aesthetic universality and
cultural relativism. Like Kant, Schiller, and Coleridge, Arnold opposes
cultural relativism and avowedly believes in something called right
reason that transcends nationality and class. But, as we saw in Schiller s
account of the aesthetic education, a universalistic account of truth and
aesthetic experience does not necessarily entail cultural traditionalism.
As I argued, Schiller s claims for the aesthetic education are based on
the universality of the aesthetic experience, not a particular cultural
canon, let alone a traditional one. For Schiller, tradition per se plays no
role in determining aesthetic adequacy.
One might argue that Arnold s famous de nition of culture in Culture
and Anarchy as the best which has been thought and said in the world
(C&A, ), by its has been, already limits culture to what has been
approved by tradition. But as I have argued, the overall argument of
Culture and Anarchy stresses culture as an ongoing process, and none of the
arguments there preclude an open and developing cultural canon. New
aspirants to the canon of culture would certainly be tested against
traditional culture, but the standard by which they would be judged will
be explicit, namely, their adequacy to develop the total human perspec-
tive. Arnold seems to abandon this potentially inclusive model of the
canon in The Study of Poetry. In Culture and Anarchy, he identi es
Romanticism, aesthetics, and nationalism
culture with breadth, change, and development. In The Study of
Poetry, he seems to identify culture with speci c traditional works for
seemingly no other reason than that these have been approved by
literary tradition.
Arnold s changed identi cation of culture is especially apparent if one
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