What is philistinism ?

Concept: In a comprehension passage a term the writer introduces is fixed by the gloss the writer attaches to it, not by the word's everyday dictionary sense. When a sentence takes the form "X bred a kind of T, an unspoken belief that ...", the phrase standing in apposition immediately after the term is the writer's own definition of it. The method is therefore to locate the term's first occurrence, read the appositive that follows it, and treat the surrounding sentences as elaboration rather than as definition.

Application: The passage defines the term at its first occurrence: "The long dominance of the historical profession by political historians bred a kind of philistinism, an unspoken belief that power and its exercise was 'what mattered'." The clause after the comma - "an unspoken belief that power and its exercise was 'what mattered'" - stands in apposition to the term and is what the writer means by it: an assumption, carried by the long dominance of political historians, that authority and its use are the things that count, so that the history of art, science, philosophy or literature is treated as less worth attention. Put in the passage's own terms, philistinism here is the belief that power and its exercise matter.

Cross-check: Checking the reading against the rest of the passage:

• The sentence that follows the gloss - "The prejudice was reinforced by the assertion that political action was never really the outcome of principles or ideas" - reports how the attitude was strengthened afterwards. Reinforcement of prejudice is therefore an effect the writer records about the attitude, not the content of the term he has just glossed.

• "Probing the reasoning that ostensibly connects premises and conclusions" comes much earlier, in the account of what intellectual historians do with texts; that clause describes examining an argument, not inventing justifications for one. Fabrication of reasons is neither asserted there nor attached to the term as its meaning.

• Land, property and economic class are not mentioned anywhere in the passage, so the hold of land-owning classes has no support in the text. The everyday association of "philistine" with the uncultivated or materially minded person is not the sense the writer fixes here.

• The end of the passage confirms the reading: "the mirror-image of this philistinism" is the claim that ideas do not matter, which is the exact mirror of holding that only power matters.

The passage's own gloss therefore gives the meaning of philistinism as the belief that power and its exercise matter.