Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Chronology
- Bibliographical note
- Note on the texts and acknowledgements
- DEMOCRACY (1861)
- THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM AT THE PRESENT TIME (1864)
- CULTURE AND ANARCHY: AN ESSAY IN POLITICAL AND SOCIAL CRITICISM (1867–9)
- Introduction
- 1 Sweetness and Light
- 2 Doing as One Likes
- 3 Barbarians, Philistines, Populace
- 4 Hebraism and Hellenism
- 5 Porro Unum Est Necessarium
- 6 Our Liberal Practitioners
- Conclusion
- Preface to Culture and Anarchy (1869)
- EQUALITY (1878)
- Index
- Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought
1 - Sweetness and Light
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Chronology
- Bibliographical note
- Note on the texts and acknowledgements
- DEMOCRACY (1861)
- THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM AT THE PRESENT TIME (1864)
- CULTURE AND ANARCHY: AN ESSAY IN POLITICAL AND SOCIAL CRITICISM (1867–9)
- Introduction
- 1 Sweetness and Light
- 2 Doing as One Likes
- 3 Barbarians, Philistines, Populace
- 4 Hebraism and Hellenism
- 5 Porro Unum Est Necessarium
- 6 Our Liberal Practitioners
- Conclusion
- Preface to Culture and Anarchy (1869)
- EQUALITY (1878)
- Index
- Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought
Summary
The disparagers of culture make its motive curiosity; sometimes, indeed, they make its motive mere exclusiveness and vanity. The culture which is supposed to plume itself on a smattering of Greek and Latin is a culture which is begotten by nothing so intellectual as curiosity; it is valued either out of sheer vanity and ignorance or else as an engine of social and class distinction, separating its holder, like a badge or title, from other people who have not got it. No serious man would call this culture, or attach any value to it, as culture, at all. To find the real ground for the very different estimate which serious people will set upon culture, we must find some motive for culture in the terms of which may lie a real ambiguity; and such a motive the word curiosity gives us.
I have before now pointed out that we English do not, like the foreigners, use this word in a good sense as well as in a bad sense. With us the word is always used in a somewhat disapproving sense. A liberal and intelligent eagerness about the things of the mind may be meant by a foreigner when he speaks of curiosity, but with us the word always conveys a certain notion of frivolous and unedifying activity.
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- Information
- Arnold: 'Culture and Anarchy' and Other Writings , pp. 58 - 80Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993
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