High culture

In a society, high culture encompasses cultural objects of aesthetic value that a society collectively esteems as exemplary works of art,^[1] as well as the literature, music, history, and philosophy a society considers representative of its culture.^[2]

In popular usage, the term high culture identifies the culture either of the upper class (an aristocracy) or of a status class (the intelligentsia); "high culture" also identifies a society's common repository of broad-range knowledge and tradition (folk culture) that transcends its social-class system. Sociologically, the term is contrasted with "low culture", which comprises the forms of popular culture characteristic of the less-educated social classes, such as the barbarians, the philistines, and hoi polloi (the masses),^[3] though the upper classes very often also enjoy low culture.

Matthew Arnold introduced the term "high culture" in his 1869 book Culture and Anarchy. Its preface defines "culture" as "the disinterested endeavour after man's perfection" pursued, obtained, and achieved by effort to "know the best that has been said and thought in the world".^[4] Such a definition also includes philosophy. Moreover, the philosophy of aesthetics proposed in high culture is a force for moral and political good. Critically, the term "high culture" is contrasted with the "low culture" terms "popular culture" and "mass culture".^[5]

In Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948), T. S. Eliot writes that high culture and popular culture are necessary and complementary parts of a society's culture. In The Uses of Literacy (1957), Richard Hoggart presents the sociologic experience of working-class people in acquiring at university the cultural literacy that facilitates upward social mobility. In the U.S., Harold Bloom and F. R. Leavis pursued the definition of high culture by way of the Western canon of literature. Media theorist Steven Johnson writes that, unlike popular culture, "the classics—and soon to be classics—are in their own right descriptions and explanations of the cultural systems that produced them" and that "a crucial way in which mass culture differs from high art" is that individual works of mass culture are less interesting than the broader cultural trends that produced them.^[6]