Matthew Arnold's influential 19th-century philosophy examines the tension between individual freedom and social order in Victorian England. Arnold argues that culture—defined as "the best that has been thought and said"—serves as the essential remedy to society's fragmentation and moral confusion.
But there is of culture another view, in which not solely the scientific passion, the sheer desire to see things as they are, natural and proper in an intelligent being, appears as the ground of it. There is a view in which all the love of our neighbour, the impulses towards action, help, and beneficence, the desire for stopping human error, clearing human confusion, and diminishing the sum of human misery, the noble aspiration to leave the world better and happier than we found it,--motives eminently such as are called social,--come in as part of the grounds of culture, and the main and pre-eminent part. Culture is then properly described not as having its origin in curiosity, but as having its origin in the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection. It moves by the force, not merely or primarily of the scientific passion for pure knowledge, but also of the moral and social passi…Continue reading →
A Victorian poet and cultural critic who lived from 1822 to 1888, he championed literature as a force for moral and social improvement in an increasingly industrial world. His elegant poetry explored themes of faith, doubt, and alienation, while his influential essays argued that culture could provide meaning in an age of declining religious certainty. All works by Matthew Arnold →
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