State and Culture

Abstract

Culture for the modern totalitarian state is a matter of political control. Learning, the arts, and the sciences, have always been subsidized by governments in Western Civilization and authoritarian states have often proscribed heterodox political or religious ideas. But the conception of the arts and sciences as tools of the state, subject to close political guidance, is a product of our century. For the first time in modern history the state has actually assumed the function of ultimate judge in scientific and artistic matters. The action of the Politburo in the Lysenko controversy, the establishment of official aesthetic criteria of the “new social realism” in the U.S.S.R. or the Nazis’ “blood and soil” doctrine in literature exemplified the new conceptions of culture by the state.