learning but to a people's whole way of life, and it was the wholesale destruction of deeply rooted folkways that troubled opponents of progress. In German social thought, the contrast between "culture" and "civilization" condemned bourgeois society and upheld German philosophy, German poetry and music, German spirituality against the conquering materialism of the French revolution. Thanks to Coleridge, who immersed himself in German Romanticism, the idea of culture entered English social criticism shorn of its Germanic chauvinism but with its antiindustrial, antimodern implications intact. In England as in Germany, bourgeois society was condemned not simply because it seemed to have so little use for art but because it severed the connection between art and the common life. It was a cardinal tenet of Romanticism that "the art of any country is the exponent of its social and political virtues," as Ruskin put it, and that art could not flourish if it isolated itself from the workaday world or served merely to add a veneer of refinement to activities otherwise dominated by the pursuit of wealth. In France, on the other hand, intellectuals who condemned bourgeois society in the name of art inherited the cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment. They had little enthusiasm for country life, handicraft production, or the art of the folk. Stendhal, Flaubert, and Baudelaire, enemies of bourgeois materialism and stupidity, nevertheless loved Paris and hated the provinces, which Flaubert described as the "home of imbecility" and Baudelaire as the "breeding ground of blockheads." For Parisian intellectuals, "civilization" lacked the negative connotations it had in Germany and England, where "culture" implied a rejection of the cosmopolitan ideal and a glorification of the decentralized, organic, and largely rural environment without which art would allegedly lose its connection with craftsmanship and with the humble pleasures of ordinary life.

It was not enough to argue the case for art, according to Ruskin, or to suppose that art could somehow serve as a privileged realm in which a few sensitive souls found refuge from industrial squalor. The fine arts reflected prevailing standards of workmanship, and a society that subordinated workmanship to profits could not expect to rival the artistic achievements of earlier ages, in which a love of beauty had informed even the humblest tasks. In Ruskin's writings, which dealt with economics as well as with painting and architecture, "culture" furnished the materials for a radical indictment of industrial capitalism and the progressive ideol

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