This chapter contextualises the dominant ideas of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture (which we continue to live with today) through a brief discussion of the nineteenth and twentieth century ideas of conservative scholars, including Matthew Arnold and F. R. Leavis. For these writers, industrialisation fundamentally disrupted both the traditional ‘authentic’ ‘folk culture’ of the peasantry as well as the elite culture of the landed classes—the mass production of art and media by the machines was argued to be a direct threat to the future of European civilisation. The solution is a consciously elitist notion of what can be considered authentic culture in society (in the words of Arnold, “the best that has been thought or said in the world”), a definable, measurable and static notion which separates the ‘high art’ of Shakespeare, Beethoven, Dante and Baudelaire, from the ‘low-brow’, mundane culture typically consumed by the masses (for example, paperback novels, pop music and mainstream films). Promoting high culture at the expense of low culture is seen as the only way that society might be improved, and people’s growing concerns for base materialism can be replaced by a potential new form of ‘cultural spiritualism’. As well as emphasising the contemporary relevance of cultural conservatism (as embodied in the very understanding of what constitutes ‘culture’ today), the chapter raises several sociological criticisms, including the historical relativism of demarcating ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, and the ignoring of class relations within the work of such scholarship.