T.S. Eliot and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture

I. T.S. Eliot: Social and Political Thought with Emphasis on Culture

Overview: Eliot’s Conservatism and Cultural Vision

T.S. Eliot’s political and social philosophy is rooted in a deeply conservative outlook, both religiously and culturally. For Eliot, political problems cannot be understood apart from moral and spiritual conditions. His mature thought reflects a conviction that civilization depends upon culture, and that culture, in turn, depends upon a shared religious and moral framework. He rejects both liberal individualism and totalitarian collectivism, seeking instead a communitarian order grounded in tradition, hierarchy, and faith.

Eliot’s conservatism is not merely political but cultural and spiritual—an attempt to preserve what he calls “the permanent things,” the inherited values, arts, and moral disciplines that give continuity and meaning to human life.

---

2. The Concept of Culture

Eliot’s most sustained reflection on culture appears in Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. Here, he defines culture as:

“That which makes life worth living. It includes all the characteristic activities and interests of a people: Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelfth of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, nineteenth-century Gothic churches, and the music of Elgar.”
(Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, 1948)

This famous passage reveals that Eliot’s notion of culture is comprehensive—embracing both high art and popular custom, moral habits and social practices. Culture is not just intellectual or aesthetic achievement; it is a whole way of life that binds individuals into a community.

---

3. Religion as the Basis of Culture

For Eliot, culture and religion are inseparable. He insists that every culture ultimately arises from a religious foundation:

“No culture can appear or develop except in relation to a religion.”
(Notes Towards the Definition of Culture)

Even when explicit belief declines, the moral and aesthetic sensibilities of a civilization remain shaped by its religious past. For this reason, Eliot argues that a Christian culture—even if not composed of entirely devout individuals—remains grounded in the Christian understanding of human nature, order, and purpose. The decay of religion, therefore, signals the disintegration of culture.

In The Idea of a Christian Society, Eliot calls for a re-Christianization of Europe, not through theocracy, but through a moral and spiritual renewal that would restore coherence to social life. Without a shared faith, society becomes fragmented, utilitarian, and spiritually barren.

---

4. Hierarchy, Elitism, and the Role of Education

Eliot conceives of culture as inherently hierarchical. In his view, cultural excellence is achieved and preserved by a small educated elite, whose intellectual and artistic labor sustains the moral and imaginative vitality of the whole society. He does not believe in cultural equality or the democratization of taste:

“The classless society is not a classless culture.”
(Notes Towards the Definition of Culture)

Eliot’s emphasis on hierarchy is not snobbery but a recognition of functional differentiation within a healthy social organism: different classes contribute in distinct ways to the overall cultural whole. The elite transmit and interpret the tradition; the ordinary citizen participates through shared customs, religion, and moral life.

Education, for Eliot, must serve formation rather than mere information—it should cultivate character, moral imagination, and reverence for tradition. A purely technical or utilitarian education, he warns, produces clever barbarians rather than citizens.

---

5. Critique of Liberalism and Secular Humanism

Eliot saw the liberal humanist tradition of the 19th and early 20th centuries as dangerously complacent. By detaching ethics from theology, liberalism—he believed—destroyed the spiritual unity of society and replaced it with individualism and moral relativism. In his view, progressive secularism leads not to liberation but to spiritual emptiness and cultural decline.

In The Idea of a Christian Society, he writes that modern liberal democracy risks becoming an “irreligious secularism” dominated by mass opinion and bureaucratic control. The alternative, he warns, could easily be totalitarianism. Thus, Eliot’s conservatism is a defensive humanism, seeking to preserve freedom through spiritual order.

---

6. Organic Unity and Cultural Wholeness

Drawing upon the aesthetic concept of “organic unity” from his literary criticism, Eliot extends it to society: a healthy culture, like a great work of art, achieves coherence through the harmonious relation of its diverse parts. Every class, institution, and tradition contributes to a unified whole. Cultural decay, therefore, results from disintegration—when religion, art, and politics lose their relation to each other and become fragmented pursuits.

---

7. European Civilization and the Ideal of Christendom

Eliot regards European civilization as the historical embodiment of Christian culture. He mourns its decline in the face of modern secularism, nationalism, and mechanized progress. In Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, he speaks of “Christendom” as both a historical fact and a spiritual ideal—a community of peoples united by a shared moral and metaphysical vision. The preservation of this ideal, he believes, requires not imperial power but cultural continuity and moral renewal.

---

8. Conclusion: Eliot’s Political and Social Legacy

T.S. Eliot’s social thought represents one of the 20th century’s most refined expressions of cultural conservatism. His reflections are less about specific policies than about the spiritual architecture of civilization. To him, politics must be the servant of culture, and culture the servant of religion. Only through a renewal of faith and tradition, he believed, can Western society recover its unity and moral depth.

Eliot’s ideal society is therefore organic, hierarchical, and Christian—a community bound not by coercion or ideology but by shared participation in a living cultural tradition.

---

Key Texts

1. T.S. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society (1939)

2. T.S. Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948)

3. T.S. Eliot, After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (1934)

4. T.S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933)

5. Secondary Sources:

   • Roger Scruton, Culture Counts (2007)

   • Christopher Ricks, T.S. Eliot and Prejudice (1988)

   • Russell Kirk, Eliot and His Age (1971)

II. T.S. Eliot's Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948): The Historical Context

1. Post–World War II Europe: A Civilization in Ruins

When Notes Towards the Definition of Culture was published in 1948, Europe was emerging from the devastation of World War II. The physical destruction of cities, the moral trauma of the Holocaust, and the dislocation of millions had produced a profound crisis of meaning. European intellectuals were asking whether Western civilization — the bearer of Christianity, reason, and art — had somehow failed.

Eliot, deeply conservative and spiritually alert, viewed the war not merely as a geopolitical catastrophe but as a symptom of deeper moral and cultural decay. He saw modern Europe as having lost its religious center, its moral coherence, and its sense of hierarchy and order. The war’s aftermath, with the spread of technological rationalism, secularism, and mass culture, intensified his anxiety about the disintegration of cultural values that he had been diagnosing since the 1920s.

Thus, Notes appears at a historical moment of spiritual exhaustion and reconstruction: when the West, though victorious militarily, faced the task of redefining its identity in the shadow of both fascism and communism.

---

2. The Cold War and the Rise of Ideology

By 1948, the Cold War had begun to divide the world into ideological camps — capitalist liberalism in the West, and Marxist collectivism in the East. Eliot regarded both as spiritually impoverished. He distrusted the materialism of American-style liberal democracy as much as the totalitarianism of Soviet communism, seeing both as products of the same secular, utilitarian mentality.

Notes thus reflects an attempt to articulate a third alternative: a society grounded in Christian humanism, where culture and religion provide the moral and imaginative unity that ideology cannot. In this sense, Eliot’s essay participates in the broader postwar intellectual movement (shared by figures such as Christopher Dawson, Jacques Maritain, and Reinhold Niebuhr) that sought to reclaim the spiritual foundations of Western civilization.

---

3. Continuity with Eliot’s Prewar Writings

Notes Towards the Definition of Culture continues themes Eliot had explored in earlier works:

• After Strange Gods (1934) – warning against moral relativism and the decline of religious orthodoxy.

• The Idea of a Christian Society (1939) – proposing that only a Christian moral order could prevent Europe from sliding into nihilism or tyranny.

In Notes, these ideas mature into a more systematic reflection on the nature, transmission, and stratification of culture. Eliot’s sense of crisis is sharpened by the war’s outcome: the collapse of traditional hierarchies and the acceleration of mass democracy, industrial standardization, and educational leveling. He feared that, without a conscious effort to preserve spiritual and cultural traditions, Europe would lose its identity altogether.

---

4. The English Context: Reconstruction and Decline

In Britain, 1948 was a year of social reconstruction under the Labour government of Clement Attlee. The welfare state was being built; the National Health Service had just been founded; and Britain was pursuing policies of social equality and modernization. While many saw this as progress, Eliot was wary of the cultural consequences of egalitarianism. He believed that culture depends on organic social differences — a natural hierarchy of functions and tastes — and that radical leveling would erode the refinement and diversity necessary for cultural vitality.

Hence, Notes can also be read as a response to postwar socialism and the growing bureaucratic state. Eliot feared that a culture managed by experts and educators rather than rooted in religious and communal life would become sterile and mechanical.

---

5. Intellectual and Religious Milieu

Eliot had converted to Anglican Christianity in 1927, and by the late 1940s he was recognized not only as a poet but as a major Christian thinker. His conversion had given his social criticism a theological grounding. The period also saw the rise of Christian humanism as a counter-movement to secular modernity — reflected in the works of contemporaries like C.S. Lewis, Jacques Maritain, and Romano Guardini.

Eliot’s Notes draws upon this milieu but expresses it with unique severity and erudition. He conceives of culture as an incarnational reality — the outward form of a people’s spiritual life — and argues that without religious faith, culture withers into mere entertainment or ideology. This idea resonated with a generation trying to restore meaning to Western life after the moral collapse of war.

---

6. The Literary and Cultural Background

By 1948, Eliot had already received the Nobel Prize in Literature (1948, the same year Notes appeared), recognizing not only his poetry but also his role as a guardian of high culture. The modernist experiment that had once been revolutionary was now canonical. Yet Eliot’s tone in Notes is not avant-garde but defensive and prescriptive — he writes as a custodian of civilization rather than a rebel against it.

Culturally, this was also the age of mass communication — radio, cinema, and soon television — which Eliot regarded with suspicion. The spread of mass culture threatened to flatten distinctions between high and low art, elite and popular taste. Notes thus also serves as a philosophical defense of cultural hierarchy and minority excellence, arguing that culture cannot thrive without a cultivated elite to sustain its spiritual depth.

---

7. Europe’s Identity and the Memory of Christendom

Perhaps most profoundly, Notes belongs to the long European tradition of self-scrutiny after catastrophe. Like Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (1918–22) or Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History (1934–61), Eliot’s essay asks what holds a civilization together. His answer — Christian belief as the foundation of culture — is historically conservative but morally urgent.

In 1948, the Marshall Plan was beginning to rebuild Europe materially; Eliot wanted to rebuild it spiritually. He viewed the idea of Christendom not as nostalgia but as the only enduring framework for unity and moral coherence in an age of fragmentation.

---

8. Conclusion: Culture at the Crossroads

The historical context of Notes Towards the Definition of Culture is therefore one of postwar reconstruction, ideological polarization, and moral uncertainty. Eliot’s work stands as both diagnosis and remedy: a meditation on the fragility of civilization and a plea for the recovery of its spiritual roots.

In sum:

• Written amid Europe’s moral exhaustion and material recovery after WWII,

• Reacting to the rise of egalitarian democracy, secularism, and mass culture,

• Seeking to define a Christian conception of culture against both liberal humanism and totalitarian collectivism,
  Eliot’s Notes is not just a reflection on art and learning, but a manifesto for the survival of Western civilization through the restoration of faith, tradition, and hierarchy.

III. Main Ideas of T.S. Eliot's Notes Towards the Definition of Culture

1. Introduction: The Aim of the Book

In Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, T.S. Eliot reflects on what culture truly means, how it develops, and what conditions allow it to flourish. Written in postwar Europe (1948), the book is both a defense of Western civilization and a Christian humanist critique of modernity. Eliot defines culture not simply as art, literature, or intellectual refinement, but as the whole way of life of a people, shaped by religion, tradition, and social structure.

The book’s main concern is how culture can survive in an age of mass society, secularization, and political upheaval. Eliot argues that without religion, hierarchy, and education rooted in tradition, culture decays into mere amusement and materialism.

---

2. The Definition of Culture

Eliot defines culture as:

“The whole way of life of a people, from birth to the grave, from morning to night; it includes their arts, their social habits, their religion, and their recreation.”

This broad definition includes both elite and popular forms, from high art to ordinary customs. Culture is therefore:

• Organic, not invented but grown over time;

• Inherited, transmitted through families, schools, and institutions;

• Communal, belonging to a whole people, not to individuals alone.

Eliot’s central thesis is that culture represents the embodiment of shared values and beliefs, and that these values cannot exist in isolation from religion.

---

3. The Inseparability of Culture and Religion

Perhaps the most crucial idea in the book is Eliot’s claim that culture and religion are interdependent. He writes:

“No culture can appear or develop except in relation to a religion.”

For Eliot, every living culture grows out of a religious faith, even if that faith later weakens. When religion dies, culture withers, since it loses its moral and metaphysical center.

In the case of Western civilization, culture has been shaped by Christianity, which has formed its moral imagination, institutions, and sense of order. Thus, a “Christian culture” does not mean a society of saints, but one whose shared assumptions about good and evil, purpose and value, are rooted in Christian tradition.

---

4. The Stratification of Society: Elites and the Common People

Eliot insists that a healthy culture requires social differentiation — distinct but interrelated classes and roles. He rejects the idea of a fully “classless society,” arguing that cultural life depends on a small intellectual and artistic elite, which preserves and interprets the achievements of civilization.

“The classless society is not a classless culture.”

However, Eliot does not advocate snobbery or exploitation. His model is organic hierarchy, where every social stratum contributes to the whole — the elite through creative and intellectual labor, and the working people through maintaining moral stability, family life, and traditions. Culture, in this view, is the result of cooperation between all parts of society, not competition.

---

5. The Role of Education

Eliot distinguishes between education and culture. Education alone cannot produce culture; it can only transmit what already exists. True education should form the moral imagination and spiritual sensibility of individuals, not merely provide technical knowledge or vocational skills.

He warns that a purely utilitarian education system — focused on producing efficient workers — will destroy the subtlety and variety on which culture depends. Schools, he argues, should be custodians of tradition, not instruments of social engineering.

---

6. The Dangers of Mass Civilization

Eliot feared that industrialization, urbanization, and mass democracy were leading to the rise of a “mass society” — uniform, secular, and spiritually empty. Mass communication and entertainment (radio, cinema, etc.) threatened to level distinctions between high and low culture, replacing genuine participation with passive consumption.

He viewed this trend as a form of cultural decay, a decline into standardization and mediocrity. True culture, for Eliot, must remain plural, organic, and rooted in living communities, not administered or produced by bureaucracies or mass media.

---

7. The Idea of a Christian Civilization

Eliot advocates for the restoration of a Christian civilization — not a theocracy, but a society where Christian principles inform social and cultural life. He believed that the Western tradition of freedom, order, and creativity ultimately derived from Christian moral philosophy. Without this foundation, liberalism would degenerate into moral relativism, and society would drift toward nihilism or authoritarianism.

Eliot’s Christian humanism was thus an alternative to both secular liberalism and totalitarian collectivism, the two dominant ideologies of his time.

---

8. Culture as Organic Unity

Borrowing from his literary concept of “organic unity” (from The Sacred Wood and The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism), Eliot applies the idea to society. A culture, like a great poem, achieves coherence when its parts — religion, politics, art, education — work together harmoniously. Fragmentation of these spheres leads to cultural disintegration.

Thus, Eliot’s vision of culture is integrative: spiritual, moral, intellectual, and aesthetic life must be united under a shared conception of truth.

---

9. The Relation between National and Universal Culture

Eliot distinguishes between:

• Individual culture – the development of a person’s sensibility and taste;

• Group or class culture – the habits and values of particular social groups;

• National culture – the collective identity of a people; and

• World (or universal) culture – the civilization shared by nations.

He argues that the higher forms of culture depend upon the lower: the individual draws upon the nation’s traditions, and the nation contributes to the common heritage of humanity. Therefore, cultural internationalism can only thrive when national cultures are strong and distinct — not when they are homogenized by global standardization.

---

10. The Decline and Renewal of Culture

Eliot concludes that cultures, like individuals, are mortal: they grow, flourish, and decay. The decline of religion, the rise of materialism, and the worship of progress threaten the survival of Western civilization. Yet he holds out hope that through spiritual renewal — a rediscovery of faith, humility, and order — culture can be regenerated.

---

11. Conclusion: Eliot’s Legacy in Cultural Thought

In Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, Eliot presents a comprehensive philosophy of civilization — an attempt to define what makes a society truly human. His main ideas can be summarized as follows: