Culture and Anarchy (Rethinking The Western Tradition) - Softcover

Matthew Arnold

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0300058675 ISBN 13: 9780300058673

Publisher: Yale University Press, 1994

Synopsis

Culture and Anarchy is one of the central texts of the western intellectual tradition and has helped to shape thinking about the tasks and requirements of culture and civil society. The book is particularly relevant now, however, because it articulates many issues about culture and cultural politics that are being intensely debated today. In the past decade, Culture and Anarchy has been the subject of discussion by both the cultural right and the cultural left, beloved by the one because it asserts the primacy of reason over the anarchy of doing as one likes, and despised by the other because it champions what many liberals consider an elitist model of culture. This new edition of Culture and Anarchy addresses this debate by including specially commissioned essays by Maurice Cowling, Gerald Graff, Samuel Lipman, and Steven Marcus that analyze Arnold's ideas from divergent political and literary perspectives and link them to contemporary concerns over the health of western culture in an increasingly multicultural society. The edition reprints for the first time in unaltered form the original 1869 text of Culture and Anarchy, providing valuable insight into Arnold's authorial intent; it is supplemented by a useful glossary of names, terms, and events and an introduction by Lipman that places Arnold in his time and discusses his initial reception and continuing importance today.

About this title

Synopsis:

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. Contributions from Maurice Cowling, Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, Gerald Graff of the University of Chicago, and Steven Marcus of Columbia University, complement Lipman's general introduction and useful glossary of names, terms, and events.

The text of this edition is the original 1869 version, which is now reprinted for the first time. This volume is the first in the series "Rethinking the Western Tradition', which will be reprinting key works attended with essays evaluating each text from differing political and literary perspectives.

From the Back Cover:

'Culture and Anarchy' is one of the central texts of the western intellectual tradition and continues to shape thinking about the tasks and requirements of culture and civil society.

About this edition

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0300058675
• ISBN 13: 9780300058673
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 252
• Editor: Samuel Lipman