Any retrospect o f Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society should begin by acknowledging that the book comes to us through an already-long history of explicit retrospection.footnote1 It is a work much looked back upon. These acts of retrospection have occurred in every decade, and have differed in kind and relative salience, as of course in critical bearing. They form no consensus beyond the unchallenged assumption that the book was important and perhaps remains so. They do not substantiate a simple narrative of any kind, even if the inertial flow of textbook characterizations is noticeable—and probably inevitable, as derived acquaintance comes more and more to predominate over direct reading knowledge as the ground of Williams’s currency and reputation.
The best-known retrospects are those of the nineteen-seventies: Terry Eagleton’s, not only the best-known but also probably the most influential, and then the interviews that made up Politics and Letters.footnote2 With all qualifications made, it can be said that Eagleton and Williams’s New Left Review interlocutors—I, at any rate—tended then to maximize the continuity between Culture and Society and the antecedent lineage of English cultural criticism and to minimize the continuity with a Marxism that Williams had first embraced, then seemingly abandoned, and was now rediscovering in new or unsuspected forms. The identifying term of this dialogic set was the phrase ‘Left-Leavisism’.
The pattern of discussion in the nineteen-eighties was more complex. Williams’s political engagements, in the domestic and international crises of the time, were now declaratively revolutionary, and Marxism was the terrain on which he forwarded the theoretical programme he sometimes called cultural materialism. At the same time, his work was called into question on new grounds, as critical investigations of race and racism and the subordination of women claimed their places at the centre of cultural theory and politics.footnote3 Indeed, this might have been the decade that forgot Culture and Society, had it not been Williams’s last: he died in 1988. Discourse on his work proliferated now, but in keeping with the protocols of the new situation. Culture and Society was widely recalled, of course: but this was retrospect as memorial.
Then, at the turn of the decade, came the final crisis of the Eastern bloc and, in much of the West, the refiguring or dissolution of the Communist parties. At home, this coincided with the ascent of social-liberalism in an exhausted Labour Party and a long season of perverse apologia for commodity culture. In this hopeless conjuncture, Culture and Society showed its most radical face (as in truth did the contemporaneous work with which it was often mistakenly twinned, Hoggart’s Uses of Literacy).footnote4 The core thesis of Williams’s conclusion—concerning the intrinsic historical creativity of socialized labour—had perhaps never seemed so coolly intransigent as it came to seem in the nineties. Here now, beyond memorial, from an earlier bad time, was ‘a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger’.footnote5
These evocations of the past forty-odd years are one way of saying, by illustration, that Culture and Society is a classic—classic in the sense that Frank Kermode gives the term in his study of the category.footnote6 It is, notably, diversely readable. Or, to put the matter in another way, it is an elusive text, never quite where you suppose it to be, where, perhaps, you would prefer it to be, whether wishfully or in a spirit of resentment. And certainly the book has had a way of chastening confident hindsight with its own backward glance, as it goes on being read and re-read, and always slightly differently.
What kind of work is it? Williams’s translators bring their own judgements. In some languages, such as Catalan and Spanish, the title retains its original form, ‘culture and society’. In Italian, the historical field and form of the book come to the fore: Cultura e rivoluzione industriale: Inghilterra 1780–1950. The German edition abandons the original title-form for something quite different: Gesellschaftstheorie als Begriffsgeschichte, or ‘social theory as history of ideas’, with a sub-title continuing ‘studies in the historical semantics of culture’. This is an impressive miniature essay in critical specification, a contribution in itself—and it may be that we owe it in part to the circumstance that a literal translation had recently been pre-empted by another publication. Kultur und Gesellschaft was the title under which, in 1965, Herbert Marcuse reissued his writings from the 1930s, including a classic work of Frankfurt Critical Theory, ‘On the Affirmative Character of Culture’.footnote7 A few years later, there appeared a selective English version, called Negations, which Williams reviewed for his university’s house magazine, the Cambridge Review. In doing so, he wrote the first, and probably the least influential, retrospect of his own Culture and Society.
Williams’s title, ‘On Reading Marcuse’, fairly indicated the nature of his interest.footnote8 He was writing about Marcuse but also about his reader, this reader, himself. In its opening phase, the review is characteristically measured—respectful, emphatically mindful of shared political commitments, yet intellectually distant. ‘I think he is more often wrong than right’, Williams says, and the difficulties extend beyond concepts and theses into matters of formation and mentality: ‘we see the world quite differently, at a level of primary experience quite as much as in developed intellectual work . . .’ But Williams reads on, and reports with ‘interest and pleasure’ a ‘possible bridge’ from Britain to this alien thought-world. It has been common to classify such moments as instances of an island empiricism saved from inanition by post-Hegelian theory. But the story Williams goes on to dramatize here, with mounting intensity, is different. The particular interest of the essay on affirmative culture, he says, is that ‘its analysis corresponded so closely with a central theme of Culture and Society, and that both were historical treatments, of very much the same problem’, while being ‘continents of countries apart in method and in language’. Williams describes ‘a marvellous moment of intellectual liberation’ as he now reads across ‘that gap’. He cites Marcuse’s summary of affirmative culture and declares: ‘This is exactly my own conclusion’ about ‘the essential origin and operation of the idea of culture, as it developed in England after the Industrial Revolution, at a time when we were very close, especially through Coleridge and Carlyle, to the German thought to which Marcuse’s arguments relate.’ And in this, he says, with an air of elation, there is ‘a sense of meeting, after a long separation’.footnote9