Abstract: Of all the voices that denigrate Mathew Arnold, two are most influential: a) the claim that Arnold was an elitist, whose views on literary criticism merely served the interests of the ruling classes; b) the assumption that Arnold was rather a propagandist for literary criticism than a critic. We need to conduct the studies of Arnold from multiple perspectives and thereby pinpoint the erroneousness of the fore-going views. We need to proceed from taste, which constitutes the pivotal part of Arnold's cultural blueprint, if we want to thoroughly understand the quintessence of his literary criticism. Arnold called for “the centre of taste” and advocated “collective standards and ideals” with the aim not only to prevent individual taste from becoming blind and arbitrary, but also to guard the whole state against growing arrogant. It seems appropriate for us to describe Arnold's critical practice with a term from Giorgio Agamben, namely “the point de perfection”. The reason is that although Arnold did not use this term to indicate his standards, he actually evaluated literary works based on whether or not they reached “the point de perfection”, thus revealing the taste as embodied in it.

Key words: taste, culture, authority, the point de perfection, literary criticism, Arnold