The Idealist Vision

Abstract

The word culture, as Raymond Williams has pointed out, in The Long Revolution (p. 41), may be used in the sense of culture as an ideal, a state or process of human perfection; it may be used in the sense of culture as a body of intellectual and artistic works; and it may be used, as the sociologists and anthropologists use it, to describe a particular way of life, including institutions and ordinary behaviour as well as literature and art. Clearly the third of these is the product of a radically different approach to society, an approach that purports to be scientific and free from value judgments and which has its origin in the Benthamite Utilitarian tradition examined in the following chapter. It is important to keep these three senses of culture in mind in reading the works of Coleridge, Matthew Arnold and T. S. Eliot; and, as will emerge more clearly later, one of Eliot ‘s great weaknesses in The Idea of a Christian Society and Notes Towards Definition of Culture is his tendency to confuse these distinct senses at the very moment he claims to be distinguishing between them.