Matthew Arnold is not primarily read or remembered for his contribution to the history of what has come to be known as ‘political thought’, and at first sight it may seem surprising to find him in such company. ‘Literary critic’ is the label most readily applied to him today; certainly, he did more than any other single figure to endow the role of the critic with the cultural centrality it has come to enjoy in the English-speaking world. At the same time, his poetry, including such frequently anthologized pieces as ‘Dover Beach’ and ‘The Scholar-Gypsy’, has earned him a secure place in the canon of English literature. He also wrote extensively and influentially on religion and education, among other topics, and at his death in 1888 he was recognized as the leading man-of-letters in Victorian Britain. Nonetheless, his best-known work, Culture and Anarchy, first published in 1869, has left a lasting impress upon subsequent debate about the relation between politics and culture, not least by provoking vigorous disagreement, and this book and the selection of his other writings included here reveal him to have been a social critic and political commentator of rare power and persuasiveness.

Culture and Anarchy, which may be one of the most frequently cited non-fiction prose works in the English language, is hard to classify in terms of modern academic disciplines.