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    Three Classes in Arnold's Culture and Anarchy

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    Zakaria Dihaji
    Arnold divides British society into three classes: the aristocrats ("Barbarians"), the middle class ("Philistines"), and the working class ("Populace"). Each class imagines happiness as doing what one's ordinary self likes, such as honors for the aristocrats, business for the middle class, and bawling for the working class. However, some individuals in each class have a love of perfection and self-improvement that takes them beyond the limitations of their class. Arnold calls this love of perfection and pursuit of sweetness and light "culture."

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    Three Classes in Arnold's Culture and Anarchy

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    Zakaria Dihaji
    351 views2 pages
    Arnold divides British society into three classes: the aristocrats ("Barbarians"), the middle class ("Philistines"), and the working class ("Populace"). Each class imagines happiness as doing what one's ordinary self likes, such as honors for the aristocrats, business for the middle class, and bawling for the working class. However, some individuals in each class have a love of perfection and self-improvement that takes them beyond the limitations of their class. Arnold calls this love of perfection and pursuit of sweetness and light "culture."

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    Arnold divides British society into three classes: the aristocrats ("Barbarians"), the middle class ("Philistines"), and the working class ("Populace"). Each class imagines happiness as doing what one's ordinary self likes, such as honors for the aristocrats, business for the middle class, and bawling for the working class. However, some individuals in each class have a love of perfection and self-improvement that takes them beyond the limitations of their class. Arnold calls this love of perfection and pursuit of sweetness and light "culture."

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    351 views2 pages

    Three Classes in Arnold's Culture and Anarchy

    Uploaded by

    Zakaria Dihaji
    Arnold divides British society into three classes: the aristocrats ("Barbarians"), the middle class ("Philistines"), and the working class ("Populace"). Each class imagines happiness as doing what one's ordinary self likes, such as honors for the aristocrats, business for the middle class, and bawling for the working class. However, some individuals in each class have a love of perfection and self-improvement that takes them beyond the limitations of their class. Arnold calls this love of perfection and pursuit of sweetness and light "culture."

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
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    Arnold, Mathew. Culture and Anarchy [Excerpt]. 1869.

    [W]e have got three distinct terms, Barbarians, Philistines, Populace, to denote

    roughly the three great classes into which our society is divided [the aristocrats, the

    middle class and the working class, respectively] … All of us, so far as we are

    Barbarians, Philistines, or Populace, imagine happiness to consist in doing what one’s

    ordinary self likes. What one’s ordinary self likes differs according to the class to

    which one belongs, and has its severer and its lighter side … The graver self of the

    Barbarian likes honours and consideration; his more relaxed self, field-sports and

    pleasure. The graver self of one kind of Philistine likes business and money-making;

    his more relaxed self, comfort and tea-meetings … The sterner self of the Populace

    likes bawling, hustling, and smashing; the lighter self, beer. But in each class there

    are born a certain number of natures with a curiosity about their best self, with a bent

    for seeing things as they are, for disentangling themselves from machinery … for the

    pursuit, in a word, of perfection. To certain manifestations of this love for perfection

    mankind have accustomed themselves to give the name of genius; implying, by this

    name, something original and heaven-bestowed in the passion. But the passion is to

    be found far beyond those manifestations of it to which the world usually gives the

    name of genius, and in which there is, for the most part, a talent of some kind or

    other, a special and striking faculty of execution, informed by the heaven-bestowed

    ardour, or genius. It is to be found in many manifestations besides these, and may

    best be called, as we have called it, the love and pursuit of perfection; culture being

    the true nurse of the pursuing love, and sweetness and light the true character of the
    pursued perfection. Natures with this bent emerge in all classes—among the

    Barbarians, among the Philistines, among the Populace. And this bent always tends,

    as I have said, to take them out of their class, and to make their distinguishing

    characteristic not their Barbarianism or their Philistinism, but their humanity …

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