Matthew Arnold and the role of the State - Critical Essay

Contemporary Review, March, 2002 by Brendan A. Rapple

MATTHEW Arnold, one of the Victorian age's great poets, education-alists, literary, political, social, and religious critics, passionately believed that England was in dire need of more State involvement at many levels of society. His views on the State owed much to his readings in ancient and modem authors, the most prominent being Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Burke, Vico, Montesquieu, Michelet, Mignet, Niebuhr, Von Humboldt, Tocqueville, Guizot, Cousin, and Renan. Nevertheless, the greatest source for these views was his own first-hand experiences of the State in action abroad. Arnold made numerous unofficial trips to foreign nations, to the USA and Canada as well as to the Continent. Two official trips include those to several Continental nations in 1859 and 1865 as an Assistant Commissioner for the Newcastle and Taunton Commissions, which were examining, respectively, elementary and secondary education. In 1885 Arnold was again sent to the Continent, this time as an emissary of the Education Department. Seeing with his own eyes the benefits accruing from foreign systems, especially those pertaining to education, sharpened for him the contrast in England where any proposals to extend State power to any appreciable degree were often met with strong negative reaction.

In his 1861 The Popular Education of France, while acknowledging that fully understanding the notion of the State required deep research, Arnold attempted to provide a practical definition in unambiguous language: 'The State is properly just what Burke called it -- the nation in its collective and corporate character. The State is the representative acting-power of the nation; the action of the State is the representative action of the nation'. Similarly, in Culture and Anarchy (1869) he spoke of 'the notion, so familiar on the Continent and to antiquity, of the State -- the nation in its collective and corporate character, entrusted with stringent powers for the general advantage, and controlling individual wills in the name of an interest wider than that of individuals'. Because of the social disintegration and tumultuous change through which England was passing, it was now essential, Arnold insisted, to establish this 'organ of our collective best self, of our national right reason'. The State, being above the separate classes, would maintain the needed societal order and deal stringently with any excesses of the three social classes.

Arnold argued in The Popular Education of France that while great benefits had undoubtedly accrued to the English national character by standing apart from State action, there had also resulted the lack of intelligence and power higher than those of ordinary individuals. It was such intelligence and power that the State represented. However, the English State rarely acted 'as if it was the organ of the national reason', and consequently its actions were often 'in very remarkable contrast with those of the State in France'. Mindful of certain absurdities of individual action in the educational realm in England, Arnold was convinced that the State 'must, in its acts, have its stand upon some ground of reason, and it can afford to treat cheaply only unreason. When a priest demands to rebaptise dissenters admitted to a public school, when a dissenter demands to be exempted from school-taxation because it hurts his conscience to help to maintain schools in which may be taught a religion which he dislikes, such pre tensions as these the French State treats as phantoms which it may confidently disdain -- for they are irrational'. It was such a State that Arnold desired for England, one that would strive to represent the collective action of the community in toto and express the better, more rational season of all while disregarding all irrationalities.

In a 1879 lecture, 'Ecce, Convertimur ad Gentes', Arnold was at pains to refute the notion held by some, such as the Benthamite Henry Fawcett, Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge, that a belief in the State betrayed a belief in modern socialism. Fawcett, Arnold reported, urged the English working class to increased self-reliance and self-help and to be especially on guard 'against resort to the State, centralisation, bureaucracy, and the loss of individual liberty'. Arnold, however, disavowed any connection between his collectivisation and socialism and quoted as support the words of the French liberal leader Leon Gambetta against the detractors of State action: 'I am not for the abuses of centralisation, but these attacks on the State, which is France, often make me impatient. I am a defender of the State. I will not use the word centralisation; but I am a defender of the national centrality, which has made the French nation what it is now, and which is essential to our progress'. The English, Arnold felt, were not likely to suffer the State to take upon itself too much power, their main problem being an over-reliance on self, self-assertion, and individual liberty.