Arnold’s cultural project armed upper classes against both capitalists and the masses

Evidence

“Wordsworth had said that England needed manners, virtue, freedom, power. Arnold saw that it had power. Freedom for him was embodied in the first Reform Act. But manners and virtue he was sure were absent and he was equally sure that their continued absence from the realm would end in the destruction of both power and freedom. … He aimed to create a body of educated men of the upper classes who would resist the crimes of Toryism and the greed and vulgarity of industrialists on the one hand, and the socialistic claims of the oppressed but uneducated masses on the other.” Ibid., p. 160. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 2405

Categorization

• XREF: Illustrates the class-bound cultural politics James dissects, shading the earlier discussion of how culture encodes class power.