Of course, the immediate reason for the lack of jobs is the failure of the economy, but behind the economic problem lies that fact that the community at large does not care enough about the unemployed to share the available work with them. The lack of a caring community, and the consequent miseries produced by unchecked industrialism and amoral commercialism, generated the social concerns of the critics discussed in these volumes. But while their concern with the evils of industrial society is common, they differ radically in their attitudes to the democracy produced by that society, some seeing it as the destroyer of all standards, others as the source of new vision.

Matthew Arnold addressed himself to these problems throughout his long career as writer and schools’ inspector, yet looking back at his writing his analysis seems strangely old fashioned and irrelevant.

This is the issue which Imelda Palmer has tackled in her book on his cultural and educational thought. In the first two chapters she looks at his perception of culture and his analysis of society, and then in the central chapter of the book she discusses the relationships he developed between the two concepts. In the final two chapters she examines the way he applied his principles in relation to elementary and secondary education.

In her discussion, Imelda Palmer shows so clearly the imprecision of Arnold’s basic concepts and the contradictions of his theories that at times the reader wonders why we should bother attending to him at all.

The author herself gives one answer when she discusses his long attempt to resolve the problem of providing an adequate elementary education for working class children whose way of life he considered fatal for any of his conceptions of culture. Logically, his principles bound him to a style of education which would aim at no more than making them useful and obedient servants of the larger society, but his nature would not allow him to accept this conclusion.

The man’s humanity and social concern made it impossible for him to see the schools merely as instruments for passing on the rudiments of knowledge. He came to see them as centres of civilisation where otherwise joyless living might be made joyful …

This social concern lies behind the logical contradictions of his theories and makes us feel that, however imprecise the language, he is struggling with real problems. It is his awareness of the need rather than his solution which commands our attention.

Yet Imelda Palmer shows us that there is another unresolved contradiction within his work which reduces the relevance of his work to the problems of education in a mass society. While his humanitarian instincts drew him to a keen sympathy, for the children of the working class – and incidentally seem to have made him an inspector or rare sensitivity – his emotions were warped by a deeply-seated fear of the anarchic energies of the working classes. As he saw it, therefore their education must not free them, but restrain them.

This fear leads to the contradictions, between his advocacy of social and educational equality and his belief in an elite of properly educated ‘aliens’ who would transform England into a civilised society which they would thenceforth rule. His revulsion against the effects of industrialism and his distaste for the philistines, the middle classes who ran the industrial society, led him to seek an instrument which would transform the vulgar society he found into the civilisation to which he aspired. He believed that he had found the instrument of transformation in culture, but he failed to face the issue of how such a culture could arise within the society he described.

Imelda Palmer shows how his conception of social transformation grew from his idea of individual perfection, and so confused ideals which are proper to the person and those which fit society. The alternative she offers is T.S. Eliot’s idea of a stratified organic society, where each part plays its own part. Politically, she offers Karl Popper’s model, where the function of the constitution is not to ensure that the best obtain power but that the worst are unable to abuse it.

She shows us how Arnold’s ideas, both about culture and about the proper content of education, are ultimately grounded in general ideals of Greek civilisation and specific forms of Platonic social thought. Like Plato, he believed that if men knew what was good they would also desire it, and this belief led him to neglect actual problems of power.

Plato’s responsibility for Arnold’s misapprehensions, however, goes further than this. Arnold’s ideal of culture is that, through it, each individual will discover his true being, and will as a consequence be able to fulfil himself in and through society. This doctrine of essence leads him to look to the past for the true ideal of mankind, and into his heart for the truth of his own being. He thus fails to recognise culture as a social creation, speaking not of eternal verities but of the facts of its own time, and fails to see the possibility that it is through a functional culture of this kind that the individual creates himself. An education built on these recognitions would be vastly different both from the ethereally inspiring models Arnold propounds and from the drearily utilitarian models of much contemporary practice.

Lesley Johnson also deals with Matthew Arnold, but unlike Imelda Palmer she is not concerned as much with the philosophical consistency of his ideas as with their social basis. The two accounts are therefore complimentary, and will both be of interest to anyone concerned with either nineteenth century though or culture and criticism.

Johnson looks on Arnold’s Hellenism not as a search for past perfection so much as a reaction against what he saw as the undue Hebraism of his time, which, by a nice Biblical paradox, he saw embodied in the contemporary philistinism. The logic of his thought would have required him to react equally against any undue Hellenism. Yet, in emphasising Arnold’s logic, Johnson ignores the probability, demonstrated in his poems, that Arnold by temperament inclined to an ideal past of Hellenic sweetness as a refuge from the ugly industrialism of his day. This inclination in turn accounts for the failure to look for social causes and solutions which Johnson sees as the central weakness of his thought. Yet quite properly she points out that his ideal was ‘An uplifting vision, indeed!’ for the future of education.

Johnson’s book is not merely an account of Arnold, but a study of the actual and perceived roles of English literary intellectuals, from Victorian times until today, in relation to social change and criticism. The study is set within a theoretical framework which sees the intellectual both as occupying a position within society – as opposed, say, to the revolutionary, who places himself outside it – and as enjoying by virtue of this position sufficient autonomy to play the part of social critic. The particular concern of these intellectuals is with culture, which both provides a motion of human perfection drawn from the past and a source of inspiration for the future. In its first aspect, therefore, culture provides an alternative to romantic doctrines of the natural man uncorrupted by civilisation, but in its second it reinforces the romantic ideal of the artist who will restore society.

One of the strengths of Leslie Johnson’s approach is to show how Arnold was not merely an individual thinker, but expressed many of the common ideals and fears of his time, particularly in relation to the need to transform the middle classes in order to avert the social and cultural degeneration which would follow from unchecked democracy.

Of Arnold’s contemporaries, the only three whom Johnson shows to escape this fear of the people are Spenser, Huxley, and Morris. Spenser believed in the power of science to free all mankind, and wanted no state or cultural apparatus to interfere with its progress. Huxley, on the other hand, believed in the importance of a full education for everyone, So that each person might enter on his inheritance as a free human being. Only Morris related the issue of freedom to that of work. His vision was that work itself should be freed, so that every person would become an artist. Unlike his earlier colleague, Ruskin, he believed that art was the product of free work, not of an elite, but he shared with him the emphasis on art rather than education as the vehicle of freedom.

Morris is the only one of these nineteenth century thinkers, in Johnson’s account, to have given any attention to the relationship between art and work, and thus to have provided a concept of culture which goes beyond pious aspirations for the ‘best’. He therefore appears to go beyond social critique to offer an alternative form of society, but Johnson suggests, without providing demonstration, that even this conception remains bounded by the existing social forms.

The literary intellectuals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been united in their distrust of the direction they saw society taking, but whereas the nineteenth century writers saw the answer in the moral transformation of the individual, particularly of the middle-class individual, the twentieth century, as Johnson sees it, was from the beginning dominated by the ideas of social reform associated with socialism and by the alternative withdrawal into cults of aestheticism. The first of these she associates with Wells and Shaw, both basically optimistic about the powers of technology and social engineering, the second with the Bloomsbury group, who withdrew into the luxury of an educated but socially detached elite.

The second cluster of literary intellectuals whose work Johnson analyses about the figure of F.R. Leavis, and is characterised by a concern for culture as community. Leavis work is motivated by his belief that industrialism has destroyed the reality of community. His literacy criticism attempts to recover the sense of an organic community, and his educational writings propose that this sense should be institutionalised through an elite trained in literary criticism, which should fit them as cultural critics by providing a criterion by which to measure the pretensions of contemporary society.

Johnson is critical of Leavis work, which she suggests is a reaction to the displacement of intellectuals from their position of cultural authority through the process of professionalisation and the cult of the expert. She complains that he restricts the ambit of culture to literature, and that the standards to which he appeals depend on the myth of, a shared culture which never existed. More fundamentally, she quotes with approval the argument that his ostensible rejection of commitment to any particular ideology, and his appeal instead to experience, an appeal she loosely describes as empiricism, conceals the fact that ‘Experience is the way in which we live our lives, which … is precisely what ideology is’. This may be true, but it is not the abstract and dehumanising ideology against which Leavis protested.

In complaining that Leavis restricts culture to literature, Johnson seems to completely miss Leavis’s understanding of the way that culture, the whole way of life of the community, is embodied in language, and can be recovered through literary study. This leads her to condemn his concept of an organic community as a myth which cannot be sustained empirically, yet the myth is demonstrated as a criterion in his literary criticism, which she largely ignores, and has in fact been shown by more recent research to have had some historical reality. It may be true that Leavis’s attempts to embody the values of an extinct community in the industrial present were destroyed by his elitism and his refusal to confront the general culture of his time, but this does not invalidate the sense of community by which he judged his times. The failure to recognise this tradition mars Leslie Johnson’s discussion not only of Leavis but of those of his contemporaries, such as Eliot, Orwell, Lawrence, and Tawney, who sought in their own ways to recover a similar community of free men.

Raymond Williams, the central figure in Johnson’s third group of critics, uses a similar concept of community as the basis of his attack on industrial capitalism, but in his case it is not a community nostalgically derived from the past but an open democratic society envisioned for the future. He sees democracy as a system of communication in which every person by right is free both to originate and receive messages, as opposed to our present system of government by organised consensus.

Williams’s conception of community, like Orwell’s, is based ultimately on a disciplined and energetic attempt to see the whole truth of his own experience. His theory is an attempt to do justice to this truth by providing an explanatory framework and guide to action. Johnson criticises him because his theory remains too wedded to his experience and to the moral traditions of literary criticism, and does not sufficiently confront social and economic issues. On the other hand, she criticises his educational proposals on the grounds that, while they offer an ideal of an education based on removing artificial differences in the community, they do not give enough attention to political practicality. She does not, however, show why a theory which proceeds from abstractions should be sounder than one which proceeds from experience, nor what would be the practical difficulties of implementing Williams’s educational ideals. She thus seems to miss his central contribution to cultural theory, which is to enrich its arid structures with the feeling of lived experience, and to recognise that the meanings we create from our experience are a part of the material productions of society. This insight reconciles the contradiction which would otherwise remain between his own democratic leanings and the debt he owes to Leavis’s elitist morality, and provides the basis for an educational practice which, by recognising the inherent human capacity to create meaning, can restore the lost community, not as a hierarchy but as a democracy.

Lesley Johnson concludes her study by examining the directions in which the concept of culture is moving today. She rejects such people as Hoggart, Wollheim, and Bantock, who continue working within the old tradition, whether to expand it to include the whole of society or to reassert its hierarchical implications as a defence against the feared breakdown of contemporary society. Instead, she affirms the kind of work now associated with the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. This work extends the meaning of culture to embrace newer art forms, and uses the concept as an object of study rather than as a criterion of social value.

Lesley Johnson’s basic criticism of the literary intellectuals is that their social theories represent in fact a defence or justification of their social position. As this position has become more threatened, so has their criticism of society become more strident, but they have not been able to escape the limits imposed on their understanding of society by their position within it. They thus attack symptoms of social malaise, not causes. Yet her own criticism should be construed as merely a justification of the new breed of academic expert and theorist which has supplanted the older generalised intellectuals. She certainly gives no indication of how her own position avoids the strictures she imposes on others. Nevertheless, within its own terms Lesley

Johnson has written a challenging study of an intellectual tradition which still to a great extent determines our understanding of what is possible and desirable in such fields as the media, public arts, and education. If she has not demonstrated the need to break from this tradition, she has at least shown where it needs rethinking. For while our economic problems are unlikely to precipitate a revolution, they may well lead to social breakdown unless we can summon up the courage and understanding to carry through a social transformation.