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Burke and William Cobbett to the present. This naturally involves
considering the evolution of other words, such as "industry,"
"democmcy," "class," and "art." How, when, and why, Mr. Wil–
liams asks, for example, did
"art,"
which in the eighteenth century
meant any kind of
skill,
come to refer exclusively to "creative art,"
and how did "art" and the "artist" come to signify autonomous en–
tities, resembling an institution? Similarly, how did "culture,"
which once meant no more than "the tending of natural
growth,"
as in "agriculture," come to mean a human pursuit of perfection
or a body of activities and values that all critics of society or of
art
have had to deal with at least since the time of Coleridge. Obvious–
ly the idea of culture arose as a response to democracy and the in–
dustrial revolution. It is not so obvious what we mean by "culture."
The value of Mr. Williams' book is not only that it traces for us
the history of the idea but that it also forces us at every point to try
to define it for ourselves.
By analogy with natural growth towards fruition, "culture"
could readily come to mean "a state or habit of mind," leading to
individual human perfection. But the further step, by which "cul–
ture" came to mean an autonomoull "body of intellectual and moral
activities" which was at once a standard and a court of appeal, was
taken when critics, whether radical, liberal, or conservative, became
alarmed about what was happening to human life as a result of in–
dustrialism and democracy, and when these critics, furthermore,
perceived that the old religious and traditional safeguards against
anarchy and barbarism could no longer be counted on. So far, "cul–
ture" is a way of personal life and a criterion by which to judge
society. But of course from the beginning, and in our own time
more than ever, the idea of culture has had an anthropological di–
mension, referring to the whole life of a society. In this meaning
"culture" is both a criterion of judgment and an objective descrip–
tion. The double meaning is implicit from the beginning, because
from Burke and Cobbett on down through Southey and Robert
Owen, Coleridge, Carlyle, Newman, Matthew Arnold, William
Moms, and so on to D. H. Lawrence, Tawney, T. S. Eliot, Leavis,
Orwell, and Mr. Williams himself, the assertion of "culture" has
