SOURCE: Marcus, Steven. “Culture and Anarchy Today.” The Southern Review 29, no. 3 (summer 1993): 433-52.

In the following essay, Marcus argues that Arnold's work, while powerful in its own time, is still applicable to the societal problems of today.

Culture and Anarchy is one of the chief English books of the nineteenth century. It occupies a prominent place among the canonical Victorian works of cultural criticism—both of the words that go into this characterizing descriptive term being permanently associated with Matthew Arnold's intellectual and spiritual life's project. It is, moreover, an integral part of a tradition to which the principal writings of Thomas Carlyle, John Henry Newman, John Stuart Mill, and John Ruskin preeminently belong, as do, in equal measure, the works of the great novelists, and to which Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and William Morris, to stop at that point, were to make later, if lesser, contributions. “Belong...