Raymond Williams was perhaps the single most important left-wing figure in twentieth-century British intellectual life. Trained in the discipline of English literature, he was a former student of F. R. Leavis, the literary critic whose work provided English studies with its dominant paradigm for much of the second half of that century.
Formed by the biographical experience of Welsh working-class life, he was also a lifelong socialist, very briefly a member of the British Communist Party, a Labour Party supporter during the 1950s and ’60s, an enthusiast for various New Left causes, especially that of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and in his last years, a fairly close associate of the Welsh nationalist party, Plaid Cymru.
Such political involvements led to an enduring interest in Marxian and quasi-Marxian versions of social and cultural theory. In one sense, the key to an understanding of Williams’s intellectual evolution consists in an appreciation of how he negotiated his own doubly ambivalent relationship to the ideas of Leavis on the one hand and Marxism on the other.
From Leavisism, Williams inherited: A commitment to organicist and holistic conceptions of culture and methods of analysis; a strong sense of the importance of the particular, whether in art or in life; and an insistence on the absolute centrality of culture. He rejected its cultural elitism, however, especially as displayed in the idea of a necessary opposition between mass civilization and minority culture.
From Marxism, he inherited a radical socialist critique of…
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Auteur: Andrew Milner
