Culture and Anarchy remains a central text of the Westem intellectual tradition, articulating many of the issues around which the modern debate about cultural politics revolves: the nature of the State; the concept of freedom as governed by reason, in contrast to untrammelled liberty; the place of religion in society; the very idea of culture as "an inward operation of the mind". A measure of the work's permanent influence is the number of current terms first coined in its pages, terms such as "Philistines", "Barbarians", and the famous definition of culture as "the best that has been thought and said". Accused in some quarters of cultural elitism, Arnold's ideas continue to occupy the foreground of the debate, and for this reason the edition includes specially commissioned essays which set the text within contemporary, multicultural perspectives. Contributions from Maurice Cowling, Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, Gerald Graff of the University of Chicago, and Steven Marcus of Columbia University, complement Lipman's general introduction and useful glossary of names, terms, and events. The text of this edition is the original 1869 version, which is now reprinted for the first time. This volume is the first in the series "Rethinking the Western Tradition', which will be reprinting key works attended with essays evaluating each text from differing political and literary perspectives.