A liberal and intelligent eagerness about the things of the mind may be meant by a foreigner when he speaks of curiosity, but with us the word always conveys a certain notion of frivolous and unedifying activity. With us the word is always used in a somewhat disapproving sense. I have before now pointed out that we English do not, like the foreigners, use this word in a good sense as well as in a bad sense. To find the real ground for the very different estimate which serious people will set upon culture, we must find some motive for culture in the terms of which may lie a real ambiguity and such a motive the word curiosity gives us. It is study of social and moral perfection. And also it is not static but it is changeable. In Chapter 1, Arnold discusses how and why perfection is the essence of true culture. Arnold’s Views on Culture According to his views, he says that, Culture is a study of perfection Culture is the process, means it is always going on. No serious man would call this culture, or attach any value to it, as culture, at all. Arnold explains that his purpose in Culture and Anarchy is to define culture, the good it can do, and why he believes in it. The culture which is supposed to plume itself on a smattering of Greek and Latin is a culture which is begotten by nothing so intellectual as curiosity it is valued either out of sheer vanity and ignorance or else as an engine of social and class distinction, separating its holder, like a badge or title, from other people who have not got it. Arnolds view of culture as involving such characteristics as beauty, intelligence, and perfection is a Neoplatonic one - that is, it tends to assume. The disparagers of culture make its motive curiosity sometimes, indeed, they make its motive mere exclusiveness and vanity. Arnold saw the anarchy of the 1860’s as the result of Puritanism’s reaffirmation of Hebraism in the seventeenth century, a reaffirmation that was against the currents of history.

Arnold culture and anarchy summary