‘A Hundred Years of Culture and

Anarchy’
In Williams R (1980), Culture and
Materialism, London and New York,
Verso
• 1860s England- characterised by
• (i) the struggle of working classes to be
granted the right to demonstrate and make
their claims public
• (ii) to have the right to vote
• (iii) Resistance from governing classes to
accede to working class demands and casting
mass protest movements as anarchy
• 1860s- times of dramatic changes reflected in
literary landmarks such as the publication of
Eliot’s Middlemarch, Marx’s Das Capital,
Thomas Carlyle’s Shooting Niagara and
Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy
• Williams draws a parallel between the 1860s
and 1960s, which are equally marked by
intense debates and protests about freedom
and rights
• Arnold’s thoughts about the importance of
culture in the education system as a means to
prevent anarchy and the decline of human
and moral values remain very topical,
according to Williams.
• The right to vote was granted to working-class
men in the 1860s and forms part of one the
greatest British democratic legacy
• When the bill to extend the vote to working
class men was first passed in 1866, it was
defeated and the Liberal Government
collapsed
• The Reform League led by the liberal John
Stuart Mill started a countrywide campaign to
rally people to this cause
• The mass meetings which were held in
support of working-class vote were not
allowed in Hyde Park, one of the central vast
public landmarks in London as they were
considered as a form of public nuisance
• While about 60, 000 workers marched onto
Trafalgar Square, some workers tore down the
railings and entered Hyde Park, challenging
the ban on their right to meet there
• Hyde Park was reserved for higher classes and
at stake was ‘whether this or any other
portion of Hyde Park belongs to a class to an
entire people’
• The right to demonstrate and the duty to
maintain public order remain at the heart of
debates on democracy even today
• Thomas Carlyle for one believed that only the
return of aristocratic rule could restore order,
a thesis that he expounded in Shooting
Niagara
• Arnold had criticised the national obsession
with economic productivity and gains and the
neglect other important pursuits such as that
of the humanities
• Arnold believed that freedom was useless if
people did not have the kind of knowledge to
make good use of the freedom of speech
• Culture to him was going beyond the
economy, ‘the opposition to manipulation.
The commitment to extend popular
education’
• Freedom without the right education was of
no value for him
• Arnold did not believe in revolution, which he
saw as a symptom of social anarchy
• He condemned the storming of Hyde Park, which,
for him was not so much the consequence of
repression as the use of passions as opposed to
reason
• Williams talks about the reformulated slogans of
today’s New Right that are reminiscent of the Old
Right’s opposing order, reason, culture and
education against popular demonstration and
chaos
• Right-wing politicians see popular restlessness
as a consequence of popular education that
Arnold had so earnestly contributed to
• Mill embodied Liberal emphasis on Law and
moderation but also on gradual change and
reform
• He even introduced a bill in favour of the vote
being extended to women but garnered
contempt from the Floor
• Excellence and human values were to be
encouraged but discipline and repression if
necessary would have to be maintained
• Williams deplores such Liberal vision
• Culture and anarchy as reason, intellect and
humanity versus popular protest cannot be seen
as two sides of social vision
• Williams sees popular demonstration on the
contrary as a means to make reason and
humanity triumph
• If the right to education comes to be
established as a privilege, then it may be time,
acc. To Williams to go back to Hyde Park.