abstract:Culture and Anarchy is a series of periodical essays by Matthew Arnold, first published in Cornhill Magazine 1867-68 and collected as a book in 1869. The preface was added in 1875.
As for his writing, it passed from poems that had been an attempt to write some small and essentially truthful things out of the depths of himself (a self that was essentially unsure, tentative, indecisive) to often magisterial, and sometimes vapid prose: pronouncements upon the state of culture, and on how culture could stave off anarchy.
That 4, 000-year-old culture sits at the border between wise development and environmental anarchy, and the people of America's polar county will soon watch with hope and fear as the oil ships move north.