Culture and Anarchy is a book by Matthew Arnold, first published in 1869.
Arnold's famous piece of writing on culture established his cultural agenda which remained dominant in debate from 1860s until the 1950s. Culture in his opinion was "the best that has been thought and said".
External links
Free eBook of Culture and Anarchy (http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/4212) at Project Gutenberg
But to envision a fresh culture around such a dessicated structure remains absurd, and fuels the popular suspicion that militants are only interested in recreating humanity in their own atrophied image, with a greatly distended political consciousness, but merely a rudimentary capacity for existential experience and appreciation.
This traumatic cultural deprivation, with its attendant disfiguration of sensibility, constitutes the foundation of the biocidal mentality.
Current mainstream culture, and the majority of its fringes, remain implicated, permeated by the stench of putrefying animal flesh, the source of totalitarian biocide.
The cultured person, liberated from the self-deceptions of the flesh and the indolence of the aesthetic by the Hebraic element, and released from the "machinery" of economic interest and political power by the Hellenistic element, follows only reason and the will of God.
In Culture and Anarchy Arnold reiterates his belief that the "best that is known and thought in the world" is recognizable as such to a cultured person, and if properly presented to any human being has the power to transform him into an arbiter of goodness, truth, and beauty in his own right.
Cowling argues that Culture and Anarchy is too deeply rooted in its local historical conditions to apply to us, and that its politics cannot be detached from a religious argument that is now irrelevant.
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