The influence of Carlyle was on the whole in favour of authoritarianism; and the teaching of Matthew Arnold ran the same way. But while Carlyle sought the aid of authority to realise divine justice, Arnold enlisted authority to defend the sweetness and light of culture against the tasteless riot of an individualistic age. In Culture and Anarchy (1869) it is the artist rather than the moralist who is in revolt against “Manchesterdom”; and Arnold is in this sense the fellow of Ruskin and Morris. But he lays his finger more definitely than his successors on a central fact of English politics—the English inability, partly due to long centuries of Dissent, partly due to the economics of laissez-faire, to form any idea of the State, “the nation in its collective and corporate capacity controlling as government the full swing of its members in the name of the higher reason of all.” In order to enthrone right reason, Arnold argues for the rule neither of the aristocracy of barbarians, nor of the middle class of philistines, nor of the populace, but of an authority which represents our best selves made perfect by culture. Where such an authority may be found he will not decide; he lays his main emphasis on the duty of attaining self-perfection through culture in order to make such an authority possible.