Culture and Government

Hunter claims that, since the Romantics, culture has been identified with the promise of a complete development of human capacities and, typically, the "rise of English" has been viewed in terms of the (true or distorted) fulfilment of this promise in the education system. His book presents a critique of this view of culture and literary education. English, he argues, inherits its "humanizing" powers not from culture but from techniques of moral supervision built into the apparatus of popular education. He also suggests that the attributes shaped by English are not parts of a full set promised by culture; rather, they are a specialized variant of those specified by governments when they took as their object the "moral and physical" condition of the population. Ian Hunter has published a number of articles in a variety of learned journals.