New Left Review I/140, July-August 1983

Raymond Williams

Problems of the Coming Period

The title I was given for this talk was ‘Problems of the Coming Period’! [*] Text of a talk to the Socialist Society, London, 11 May 1983. When this was set, some six weeks ago, the coming period that was in mind was the twenty years or so up to and through the millennium; that term which we still have to use, millennium, for the Western Christian date of 2000, but which also has its ironic echoes of the coming good time, the transformation. It happens that the period up to the year 2000 is by any reckoning, whatever numerical system you employ, one of the major periods of crisis in all human history. So the perspective of that period seems an important thing to discuss.

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