Cultural Policy and Its Implications for Heritage Tourism in Twentieth Century

The ideology underpinning cultural policy in the modern era is generally considered to have been that of liberal humanism. Liberal philosophy is characterised by an emphasis on the rights of the individual (often vis a vis the state), to realise him or herself to the full, whilst humanism considers reason as the common driver of progress for all humanity. Implicit in liberal humanism is a universal conception of culture as being the best and finest that human society has achieved in the arts, science and knowledge a common standard against which all societies can be considered and to which all people can aspire. Yet the post-WWII period has witnessed a questioning of this outlook, and this questioning informs many of the debates in contemporary cultural policy, including those pertaining to cultural tourism. The liberal humanist view of culture was famously defined by 19thcentury educationalist Mathew Arnold in his 1867 polemic Culture and Anarchy thus: culture is ‘the pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world’. Further, Arnold argued that society should ‘make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere’, and that ‘the aim of the cultured individual’ is to carry ‘from one end of the society to the other, the best knowledge, the best ideas of their time’. This vision was in the Enlightenment tradition, which upheld a universal conception of human culture, rather than one that takes as its starting point different cultures. Museums, art appreciation, music
in so far as they were supported by the state developed around Arnold’s themes in developing Western societies, and the legacy remains strong today. In the UK, for example, cultural policy has in the past been very much in this tradition. From the Acts of Parliament establishing public libraries (1850) and public museums (1849), funding for arts and culture have been infused with Arnold’s notion of culture and being a cultured individual. A similar tradition is evident in the USA, France and other industrial societies (Source: International Cultural Tourism).