The Culture and Civilization Tradition

The earliest sustained engagement with popular culture, which treated it as a threat to standards and defended a minority high culture against the levelling effects of mass society.

Definition

The culture and civilisation tradition is a body of conservative cultural criticism, associated with Matthew Arnold and F. R. Leavis, that equates culture with a body of great works and intellectual standards, and regards popular or mass culture as a corrosive force to be resisted by a cultivated minority.

Scope

This topic covers the Arnoldian and Leavisite tradition of cultural criticism that runs from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth. It examines Arnold's conception of culture as 'the best that has been thought and said', the Leavisite alarm at mass civilisation, and the educational project of training discrimination against commercial culture. It treats this tradition as the foil against which later, more sympathetic approaches to popular culture defined themselves.

Core questions

• What did Arnold mean by culture as 'the best that has been thought and said', and how did he oppose it to anarchy?
• Why did the Leavises see 'mass civilisation' as a threat to cultural standards?
• How did this tradition propose to defend culture, and through what institutions?
• Why has the tradition been so influential as a target for later cultural studies?

Key concepts

• the best that has been thought and said
• anarchy
• mass civilisation
• minority culture
• discrimination
• cultural standards

Key theories

Culture as the best that has been thought and said

Arnold defines culture as the pursuit of perfection through acquaintance with the finest achievements of humanity, a civilising force set against the 'anarchy' of an industrialising democratic society.

Mass civilisation versus minority culture

Leavis argues that industrial mass society debases taste and that the preservation of cultural standards depends on a small, trained minority capable of genuine discrimination.

Training critical awareness

Leavis and Thompson propose an educational programme that inoculates pupils against the manipulations of advertising and commercial popular culture by cultivating discriminating reading.

History

Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy (1869) responded to the social tensions of Victorian industrial democracy by proposing culture as a counterweight to disorder. In the late 1920s and 1930s F. R. Leavis, Q. D. Leavis and the Scrutiny circle in Cambridge reworked Arnold's ideas into a programme defending literary standards against the cinema, advertising and popular fiction of mass society. This tradition dominated English cultural criticism until challenged after 1945 by the culturalist writers who took popular culture seriously on its own terms.

Debates

Elitism and its critics

Whether the tradition's defence of standards is a legitimate concern for cultural quality or an elitist dismissal of ordinary people's culture rooted in class prejudice.

Key figures

• Matthew Arnold
• F. R. Leavis
• Q. D. Leavis
• Denys Thompson

Seminal works

• arnold1869
• leavis1930
• leavisthompson1933

Frequently asked questions

Why study a tradition that is so hostile to popular culture?

It is the historical starting point for the academic study of popular culture and supplied the assumptions — that the popular is inferior and threatening — that later cultural studies set out to dismantle. Understanding it clarifies what is at stake in the field's subsequent debates.