The Long Revolution of Raymond Williams: "Culture and Society" Fifty Years On

Here again is Williams in his 1979 interview with the editors of the New left Review, explaining how Culture and Society is located at several removes from radical culture: "[T]he origins of the book lie in ideas of either explicitly conservative or contradictory thinkers in the nineteenth century-but conservatives who, at the point of irruption of a qualitatively new social order put many of the right questions to it but of course came out with the wrong answers-or people with whom I shared certain impulses, like Leavis, moving towards explicitly reactionary positions in the twentieth century" (Politics 109). According to St. Clair, the archival record doesn't support the conventional narrative of a steady rise of reading over the course of the long 18th century. St. Clair: "As far as I can see, with the partial exception of Raymond Williams, none of the modern authors who claim that the eighteenth century saw a steady rise in reading in Great Britain has appreciated that a rise in absolute levels may be a fall in real terms" (88-9). According to St. Clair, Williams comes very close to getting it right, certainly more so than any other writer on the topic.