SOCI327: 3

Relevant Media:

• The full text of Robert Owen‘s ‘Observations on the Effect of the Manufacturing System With Hints for the Improvement of Those Parts of it Which are Most Injurious to Health and Morals’ from the early 19th century, as mentioned in this session, is available at Google Books.

• The full text of Arnold’s ‘Culture and Anarchy’ is available at Project Gutenberg.

• In 2012, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a series entitled ‘The Value of Culture’. This first episode considers Matthew Arnold’s ideas on culture and their influence.

• Towards the end of this session, the influence of Matthew Arnold’s thought on current education policy in the UK is briefly considered. In 2013, then Education Secretary Michael Gove encouraged teenagers not to send each other explicit text messages, but rather to use a new app (developed by a friend of the Prime Minister) to send each other Arnold’s poems instead.

• Belief in the power of art to make things better in all kinds of ways clearly persists. For instance, re-uniting Britain after the 2016 vote for ‘Brexit’, or preventing mass shootings.

Cultural Guide:

• ‘The Ambassadors’

“This painting memorialises two wealthy, educated and powerful young men. On the left is Jean de Dinteville, aged 29, French ambassador to England in 1533. To the right stands his friend, Georges de Selve, aged 25, bishop of Lavaur, who acted on several occasions as ambassador to the Emperor, the Venetian Republic and the Holy See. […] Both men were closely involved in the political and religious turmoil sparked by the Reformation and the painting may reflect their concern about the uncertainties of the time.”

• ‘For The Love of God’. In this video, British artist Damien Hirst,

“reveals his thoughts behind the [2007] construction of For the Love of God, his £50m platinum and diamond skull sculpture.”

• Harris Museum, Preston. Neoclassical museum and gallery in North West England.

“Building began in 1882 but, due to problems over costs, the museum and art gallery did not open until 1896. There were copies of Assyrian reliefs and of the Parthenon and Bassae friezes, together with inspiring inscriptions from Pericles’s funeral oration and from Byron’s Manfred, while looking down from the sculpture in the pediment by Edwin Roscoe Mullins were Thucydides, Socrates, Pericles, Pindar, Phidias, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and others.”