It may seem strange to claim Eliot for a modernism committed to the democratization of experience when he remained throughout his life attached to notions of hierarchical and class societies. But the move from the aesthetic to the political is rarely simple. It is a curiosity of Eliot's amazingly productive writing life that the only really long discursive text he wrote was his doctoral dissertation. Many books were mooted, but they always ended up as collections of essays or published lectures. My own suspicion is that Eliot never completed a book-length project because he would have had great difficulty in articulating his belief in a national language as the genuine spirit of a people other than in the elliptical and enigmatic fragments that we have scattered through his essays and poems. Had he done so it might have seemed easier to reconcile the democratic thrust of his poetry with his authoritarian and conservative politics. His very last major prose work Notes towards the Definition of Culture is the closest we get to a full statement of his cultural theories and it is a short book itself made up of disparate texts – some occasional (lectures he gave in Germany immediately after the war on European culture), some more clearly designed for publication as a continuous argument.

In taking aim at culture, Eliot was clearly and explicitly taking aim at the beliefs of the victors in the Second World War both international – the cultural ambitions of organizations such as UNESCO – and national – the cultural policies of the newly elected Labour government. It should be said that these beliefs are in many respects current. Culture is held to be a good that should be freely available to as many of the people as possible, and, if arguments over the content of that culture (above all questions of popular versus canonical culture) have proliferated, the basic assumption that culture is a good to be widely distributed animates much of the discourses and practices of state support of the arts in the Western world. Eliot argues that treating culture as a separable part of society is impossible: the great works of culture grow out of the culture of awhole people; traditional culture is tied to the class society that has produced it.