SOURCE: Cowling, Maurice. “One-and-a-Half Cheers for Matthew Arnold.” In Culture and Anarchy, edited by Samuel Lipman, pp. 202-12. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994.

In the following essay, Cowling analyzes the intent of Culture and Anarchy and the difficulty of trying to translate the work into modern terms.

In 1984 William Bennett, then chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities and later President Ronald Reagan's Secretary of Education, published a pamphlet which implied that Matthew Arnold could be put to conservative use in American public discussion.¹ What Bennett meant by this was not anything directly political, but that American universities were not doing enough to transmit “the accumulated wisdom of our civilisation” and should do more by creating syllabuses out of texts which embodied what Arnold had called a “disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world” [Complete Prose Works, edited...