High culture is a term, now used in a number of different ways in academic discourse, whose most common meaning is the set of cultural products, mainly in the arts, held in the highest esteem by a culture. In more popular terms, it is the culture of an elite such as the aristocracy or intelligentsia, but also defined as a repository of a broad cultural knowledge, as a way of transcending the class system. It is contrasted with the low culture or popular culture of, variously, the less well-educated, barbarians, Philistines, or the masses.

Although it has a longer history in Continental Europe, the term was introduced into English largely with the publication in 1869 of Culture and Anarchy by Matthew Arnold, although he most often uses just "culture". Arnold defined culture as "the disinterested endeavour after man's perfection" (Preface) and most famously wrote that having culture meant to "know the best that has been said and thought in the world"—a specifically literary definition, also embracing Philosophy, which is now rather less likely to be considered an essential component of High Culture, at least in the English-speaking cultures. Arnold saw high culture as a force for moral and political good, and in various forms this view remains widespread, though far from uncontested. The term is contrasted with popular culture or mass culture and also with folk culture, but by no means implies hostility to these.

Roger Vernon Scruton (born 27 February 1944) is a conservative English philosopher and writer. He is the author of over 30 books, including Art and Imagination (1974), Sexual Desire (1986), The Aesthetics of Music (1997), and A Political Philosophy: Arguments for Conservatism (2006). He has also written several novels and two operas.

Scruton was a lecturer and professor of aesthetics at Birkbeck College, London, from 1971 to 1992. In 1982 he helped found The Salisbury Review, a conservative political journal, which he edited for 18 years. Since 1992 he has held part-time positions at Boston University, the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., the University of St Andrews, and the Institute for the Psychological Sciences in Arlington, Virginia—a school affiliated with the Legion of Christ, a conservative Catholic religious congregation. He also founded the Claridge Press in 1987, and sits on the editorial board of the British Journal of Aesthetics. He serves in addition as a member of the International Advisory Board of the Center for European Renewal.