Our enemy, the state …

… Matthew Arnold’s error: the state is bad for culture | Arts & Culture | Books & Essays | review of books, April 2014 | spiked. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The key point is that directed freedom is not freedom unless it is self-directed. Culture employed to make us better expresses a degree of paternalism that runs counter to the idea that we might make ourselves better through its study and pursuit. The only other way Arnold might have argued would be to say that those ‘remnants’ of each class – the unusual ones – actually form a model for leaving culture up to individuals. That is the only reliable way for people to become more cultured: if they study and pursue it freely rather than because the state makes them.

This is the position of Albert Jay Nock.