Culture and Anarchy

Download or read book Culture and Anarchy written by Matthew Arnold and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1994-01-01 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Culture and Anarchy remains a central text of the Westem intellectual tradition, articulating many of the issues around which the modern debate about cultural politics revolves: the nature of the State; the concept of freedom as governed by reason, in contrast to untrammelled liberty; the place of religion in society; the very idea of culture as an inward operation of the mind. A measure of the work's permanent influence is the number of current terms first coined in its pages, terms such as Philistines, Barbarians, and the famous definition of culture as the best that has been thought and said. Accused in some quarters of cultural elitism, Arnold's ideas continue to occupy the foreground of the debate, and for this reason the edition includes specially commissioned essays which set the text within contemporary, multicultural perspectives.