a passion for diffusing, for making prevail, for carrying from one end of the society to the other, the best knowledge, the best ideas of their time; who have laboured to divest knowledge of all that was harsh, uncouth, difficult, abstract, professional, exclusive; to humanize it, to make it efficient outside the clique of the cultivated and learned, yet still remaining the best knowledge and thought of the time.
All this was culture—the sense of more things in life than the economy, the opposition to manipulation, the commitment to an extending popular education. Its enemies were the political and economic system, the manipulators, the anti-educators.
So far so clear. But there was also Hyde Park. The Hyde Park rioter, Arnold argued—very quickly abstracting and simplifying—was a symptom of the general anarchy. He did not want revolution, though he would like his own class to rule, just as the aristocracy and the middle class prefer their own forms of domination. In ‘Our paradisical centres of industrialism and individualism’ many people were taking the bread out of one another’s mouths, for there was no real social order, no idea of the State as the collective and corporate character of the nation. So, having not yet quite settled to his place in the system, the rioter—he becomes suddenly ‘the rough’—
is just asserting his personal liberty a little, going where he likes, assembling where he likes, bawling as he likes, hustling as he likes.
The temperature, it will be noticed, is rising.
His right to march where he likes, meet where he likes, enter where he likes, hoot as he likes, threaten as he likes, smash as he likes. All this, I say, tends to anarchy.
It certainly does. Nothing is stranger, in Arnold’s often scrupulous, often self-consciously charming and delicate prose, than the escalation, the coarseness, of these Hyde Park verbs. Then, writing while the argument was still going on in parliament, he went suddenly much further. He restated his general position:
For us, who believe in right reason, in the duty and possibility of extricating our best self, in the progress of humanity towards perfection, for us the framework of society, that theatre on which this august drama has to unroll itself, is sacred; and whoever administers it, and however we may seek to remove them from their tenure of administration, yet, while they administer, we steadily and with undivided heart support them in repressing anarchy and disorder; because without order there can be no society; and without society there can be no human perfection.
It is a point of view. Certainly it contrives to forget the start of the disorder: the defeat of the reform legislation, the locking of the gates against the reform meeting (for which, as it happens, there were no legal grounds). As so often, it picks up the story at a convenient point: at the point of response, sometimes violent, to repression; not at the repression itself. Even so, it is a point of view, and a familiar one.
But then Arnold again goes on:
I remember my father… when the political and social state of the country was gloomy and troubled [in the 1820s—KW] and there were riots in many places, goes on, after strongly insisting on the badness and foolishness of the government … and ends thus: As for rioting, the old Roman way of dealing with that is always the right one; flog the rank and file, and fling the ringleaders from the Tarpeian Rock! And this opinion we can never forsake, however our Liberal friends may think a little rioting, and what they call popular demonstrations, useful sometimes to their own interests and to the interests of the valuable practical operations they have in hand.
Even if it is to abolish the slave-trade
—still we say no, and that monster processions in the streets and forcible irruptions into the parks, even in professed support of this good design, ought to be unflinchingly forbidden and repressed.
In a later edition Arnold left this out. We must give him the credit of his second thoughts. But it is still very remarkable that the humane argument of the initial position should approach, let alone reach, this degree of anger and desire for repression.
Yet the conjunction may be significant, at some level quite difficult to define. The hostile reaction to demonstrations and sit-ins, in our own period, is easy to understand when it comes from the traditional right. But there is now also a New Right, talking of excellence and humane values and discipline, in the same breath; seeing minor demonstrations as ‘anarchy’ and ‘chaos’ and opposing them in the name of reason and culture and education.
Arnold is a source for this group, though it is significant that many of them have dropped much of his actual social criticism and especially his untiring advocacy of extended popular education. That part of Arnold, indeed, is now seen as a main symptom of the ‘disease’ they believe they are fighting. But that is often how names and reputations are invoked from the past.
There are others they might have chosen. I can’t agree with all Mill did, in those months, but if you want liberal reason in action, Mill then embodies it: the emphasis on law and moderation but also the emphasis on change and reform (he had introduced a bill giving the vote to women, a measure well beyond the thoughts of the majority of the Reform League; it was derisively defeated). Mill, one could say, shows how a traditional intellectual can respond at his best: acting through the values of reason at the points where it mattered. I would differ from him in my belief that the second Hyde Park meeting ought to have been held and supported; there was no law or reason to prevent it, and any provocation or violence would have come only from the authorities. But Mill was anxious. He mediated and moderated. He kept to his own values.
Arnold is different, and so are our own little Arnolds. Excellence and humane values on the one hand; discipline and where necessary repression on the other. This, then as now, is a dangerous position: a culmination of the wrong kind of liberalism, just as Mill, as far as he went, was a culmination of liberalism of the most honest kind. The issues continue: the law and the unions; new education acts; the ins and outs of two dominant and competing parliamentary parties. As we think and act through very comparable events, a hundred years later, it is of some real help to know how the ‘culture and anarchy’ argument started.
But what is even more important is to identify and prevent that short-circuit in thought which Arnold represents. The attachment to reason, to informed argument, to considered public decisions, and indeed, in Arnold’s terms, to learning from all the best that has been thought and said in the world, requires something more than an easy rhetorical contrast with the practices of demonstration and of direct action. For these, in the eighteen-sixties as in the nineteen-sixties, were entered into at just those points where truth and reason and argument were systematically blocked, and where ‘authorized’ force was invoked not to clear the barriers but to erect and defend them.
It then matters very much whether those who believe in reason and in informed argument are able, within the noise of confrontation, to go on making the necessary distinctions. It matters also whether, in the inevitable tensions of new kinds of argument and new kinds of claim, the defenders of reason and education become open to new and unfamiliar relationships, or instead relapse to their existing habits and privileges and then—as is now happening, but as significantly didn’t happen in Arnold —manoeuvre and combine to restrict, to purge, to impoverish education itself. For the culture which is then being defended is not excellence but familiarity, not the knowable but only the known values. And while people like that dominate and multiply, it will always be necessary to go again to Hyde Park.