The Foundation Of Culture In Matthew Arnold's Culture And Anarchy

In Matthew Arnold’s 1869 essay, “Culture and Anarchy”, there is little discussion about the word culture. Instead, he describes culture as striving for perfection in a world without it. Without a clear definition, the meaning of the word is open to interpretation and thus will mean different things to different people. While I do not necessarily agree with Arnold’s ideas, they are the foundation for the thought about culture. While Arnold builds a foundation for the study of culture, it was F.R. Leavis who built on this foundation in his 1933 text “Mass Civilizations and Minority Culture”.

Leavis broached the topic of defining culture by harkening back to Arnold’s previous work on the subject, “For Matthew Arnold is in some ways less difficult…today

Culture can be present in any group, large or small. There are no special skills required to form a culture, all that is needed are the thoughts and ideas of the social group’s members. These provide a meaning to the people inside the culture and provide something to study for those outside the culture who wish to better understand it.

Karl Marx also influenced my understanding of culture. He wrote about the hierarchy of a society, and it is this hierarchy that leads us to popular culture. Marx and his “division of labor,” (Marx, 1845) were pivotal to the formation of the upper and lower classes, and the culture of these lower classes helped to build a popular culture. Without the division of a society into different classes, we would be left with one singular class and, thus, one singular culture. Dividing a society into classes of power or intellect is a necessity to order and the long-term viability of a social group.

In my opinion, popular culture is the combination of different beliefs into a singular social group in order to form an overarching culture for the group as a whole. The views of those in the lower class are valued just as much as those in the upper class. In other words, popular culture should include input from everyone, not just the social and academic