This article (published in two parts) examines and refutes critiques of the concept of culture. The post-modernist identification of "culture" with colonialism and imperialism is a false diagnosis: marked by its reaction to Enlightenment universalism, the historico-ideological context within which the idea of culture took shape indicates the opposite. In turn, anxieties over the imminent end of human cultural variety are revealed to be groundless: globalisation and other capitalist phenomena, far from imposing a monotonous hegemony on the planet, have generated a historically unprecedented diversity of cultural forms and contents.