Americans who do not follow the debates of the British left may find it difficult to understand why The Long Revolution1 caused such a stir in England. At first it was almost universally praised. But Richard Wollheim argued against it in his Fabian tract, Socialism and Culture, 2 and Dwight Macdonald denounced it in the pages of Encounter, and now the argument has spread to other journals with the result that The Long Revolution has become one of the most discussed books of the year. It has got this attention, moreover, in spite of being written in a ponderous, murky style—quite a step down from Mr. Williams’s relatively lucid writing in Culture and Society (1958). What is the reason for all the excitement? My impression, after reading a few of the favorable reviews, is that in some perverse way The Long Revolution has touched the hearts of discouraged British socialists.
I say perverse way because in the book Mr. Williams makes the point-blank assertion that socialism in England “has almost wholly lost any contemporary meaning.” Yet perhaps by now British socialists are prepared to accept this fact.3 For several years they have been trying to resolve certain irrepressible doubts about the continuing relevance of socialist ideas. Has the welfare state actually provided enough of what socialists always have wanted? Of what use, after all, is a theory of society designed as an alternative to crude capitalism now that that form of capitalism no longer exists? It is true that Macmillan’s England is a far cry from the socialist ideal, but given the world situation how would socialists improve matters? What finally comes through all the bright talk of recent years is a profound uncertainty about the present rationale for socialism.
Among the many efforts to cope with this problem, C. A. R. Crosland’s exhaustive analysis, The Future of Socialism (1955), exemplifies the bland, wistful tone of the British left nowadays. Yes, says Crosland, we still need socialism, but his voice carries none of the old-fashioned fervor. Nor does his program have anything like the doctrinal clarity of the old slogans, the forthright demand, say, for public ownership of the means of production. Assuming (somewhat hastily, one suspects) that England is on the threshold of mass abundance, Crosland puts aside the problems of economic growth and efficiency as no longer of primary concern. He regards the past and potential achievements of the welfare state as obviating the need for a radical change in the economic structure. The trouble is that once socialists take this position, and many do, they quickly lose their political identity. If they no longer believe there is anything fundamentally wrong with the economic system or, to use orthodox Marxian terminology, the “relations of production,” then what is the distinctive feature of their creed?
British socialists have come up with a number of possible answers to this nagging question. Crosland, for example, sees Britain as moving toward what he considers a good society, but not fast enough. Accordingly he ends up with a program aimed at more welfare, greater equality, more liberty and gaiety in private life, and what he calls “cultural and amenity planning.” However sensible this solution may be, it is hardly exciting. It offers no sharp ideological focus, no opportunity for moral indignation, no enemy to replace the capitalist of old. Only toward the close of his book does Crosland veer toward another approach that is becoming increasingly popular among intellectuals. This is to say that socialism now is just as necessary as it ever was, but in order to fulfill cultural rather than material needs. After all, the classic indictment of capitalism always has been double-edged: it rejects the system as inefficient and in the long run unworkable, but quite apart from economic criteria, it rejects capitalism as fundamentally immoral. Extending the second charge, many socialists today contend that under capitalism, no matter how productive, the “general quality of life” will remain so mediocre that only a total reorganization of society can improve it. What is needed, in short, is a socialist culture.
But the difficulty is that no one quite knows exactly what these words mean. What would or should a socialist culture be like? Unfortunately, there is almost no doctrine in the scriptures of the left to draw upon, even as a starting point. (Marxists tend to see the whole realm of culture as of secondary importance, a superstructure built upon an economic foundation.) But it is unlikely that any theory developed in the 19th-century, along with the main body of socialist ideas, would be of much use in the era of mass communications. In this sphere, accordingly, a host of puzzling questions arise. Should socialists, as majoritarians, identify themselves with “mass culture”? Union leaders might say yes, but that would offend intellectuals who share the violent antagonism toward popular culture which pervades the best of modern art and literature. Should socialists then contrive to identify with the audience and apparatus, but not the standards, of mass culture? Or should they, as Trotsky urged, concentrate on perpetuating the best of “bourgeois culture”? Exactly what is wrong with our stratified contemporary culture anyway? It is all very well for highbrow literary types to sneer at the kitsch on the television screen if they share the political values of T. S. Eliot. But a socialist must face the fact that the great audience is not complaining. Nor does it seem helpful to try to preserve—or revive—a “working-class culture” which may have existed once, but now is disappearing. With the exception of Richard Hoggart, who does look closely at the evidence in his remarkable book, The Uses of Literacy, most people who talk about “working-class culture” do not have anything very specific in mind. As used today the term often sounds less like a sociological category than a poetic fancy obscurely associated with George Orwell, the novels of D. H. Lawrence, and second-hand impressions of masculine comradely down in the mine. In his final chapter, Hoggart reluctantly concludes that England is “becoming culturally classless.” If election returns are any indication, he is correct; most Englishmen nowadays do not like being identified with the “working class” or even, for that matter, with “Labor.”
Meanwhile, in the pages of the New Statesman and kindred journals, the discussion of socialism and culture goes on and on, sounding each week just a bit more like an 18th-century theological controversy; except that now, instead of having to grasp countless redefinitions of free will, foreknowledge, justification, and grace, one must try to hold on to all the slippery variations of the culture concept: culture, mass; culture, general; culture, working-class—bourgeois, high, low, capitalist, socialist, and so forth. Reading the British left on this subject one cannot help feeling that the whole stream of socialist thought in the West is drying up—running rapidly into a desert of abstractions and just plain words, words, words.
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Is it any wonder, then, that Labor party intellectuals are ready to listen to Raymond Williams when he says, in effect, let’s toss all this verbal baggage out the window and find a new way of looking at our situation? That at least seems to explain the initial appeal of this provocative book. The Long Revolution is effective in its assault upon obsolete assumptions, but I hasten to add that Mr. Williams does not take us very far down the road he thinks we should travel. It is one thing to say that we need to rid ourselves of an outworn vocabulary of social thought, but it is quite another to invent a new one. Besides, one gets the feeling that Mr. Williams, whose own background is working-class, has very little confidence in the power of ideas to encompass “real life.” He is suspicious of the motives of intellectuals, and in his view of the past, ideas tend to be mere rationalizations.
The Long Revolution is divided into three parts. In the first part Mr. Williams expounds some unorthodox opinions about the relation between creative activity and society. Yet “relation” is the wrong word, since it so strongly emphasizes that initial separation of the self from the community, minds from objects, which Mr. Williams would play down. (In a sense the entire book may be read as an attack upon this ruling, dualistic assumption of modern European culture.) He says that we will not be able to think constructively about the problems of culture until we abandon the oversimplified, dualistic model of communications we have been using since the 17th century. In his view the model itself is a product of temporary historic conditions, and by now it is dangerously outmoded. (Here his forte, as in Culture and Society, is demonstrating the particular circumstances affecting the genesis of categories we use uncritically.) Nowadays we are in the habit of rewarding creativity as the product of an opposition between the individual and his society. But in fact, says Mr. Williams, the true source of our power is collective, not individual. So far from being “natural,” then, the familiar tension between artists or intellectuals and the rest of the community is a kind of neurotic projection. Because it forms the very lens we use to record the past, we get a distorted picture of all earlier culture. In a sample analysis of Britain in the 1840’s, he therefore is at pains to reveal the continuity rather than the tension between the arts and other modes of social behavior. He finds a common pattern of thought and feeling in politics, business, technology, religion, and literature.
Accordingly, Mr. Williams proposes to revamp our entire historical method. His point is that if we turn to the past seeking evidence of the gulf between private and public experience, that is of course what we will find; but if we look for the subtle connections between all contemporary modes of expression, we will find what is even more important and more useful. First, however, we must accept his major premise: the essential wholeness of culture embracing the one and the many, thought and action, and at the highest level of abstraction, the subject and object. If we do so, the truly significant theme of modern history will become plain. It is not the alienation of the tortured individual that counts, but the massive, revolutionary thrust of anonymous people, the “general growth of humanity.”
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What Mr. Williams is attacking, in a word, is individualism. Our confusion, he says, follows from the notion that there ever was or ever could be such a thing as a single, bare human being—the metaphysical Robinson Crusoe, as it were, of modern thought. In place of this false abstraction, he invites us to begin all of our thinking with an actual community, a total social organism antecedent to any individual and the true source of his mode of perception. His mind is bound to other minds, and to external (or institutional) patterns of behavior by what Mr. Williams calls a “structure of feeling.” Unfortunately this key concept, which he apparently borrowed from anthropology, remains somewhat vague. (In many ways it resembles Ruth Benedict’s “pattern of culture.”) The notion of a common “structure of feeling” is crucial to the argument of The Long Revolution because it serves to divest the private consciousness of its significance. The cult of the self is Mr. Williams’s adversary; it is for him the center of all resistance to the communitarian ethos inherent in the “long revolution.” Unlike most literary men nowadays, Williams is sympathetic to the positive feelings of working people toward industrialism. He recognizes that they hardly can be expected to deplore the loss of an individualistic style of life they never knew.
Having cleared the ground of false premises, Mr. Williams takes a close look in the second part of the book at the evolution of several British cultural institutions, such as the educational system, the reading public, the popular press, and Standard English. What he says about the educational system is characteristic of the entire pattern. In theory the egalitarian principles of the “long revolution” now have been accepted in Britain; all members of society are accorded the right to be educated. But in practice the system still is based on the existence of a limited ruling class, a middle professional class, and a large operative class. If the promise of democratic education has not been realized, says Mr. Williams, that is because it really never has been tried. The same argument applies to all phases of contemporary British culture. That the “long revolution” has failed is an illusion; its main thrust has been blocked by hostile groups and, even more serious, by the lingering of outmoded individualistic habits of thought. Since the revolution is on the whole just, good, and necessary, the only thing to do now is get on with it.
The third part of The Long Revolution, a description of “Britain in the 1960’s,” is intended to show the unsatisfactoriness of the unfinished revolution. England today is a half-democracy. Although the economic system no longer fits the old definition of capitalism, the patterns of behavior promoted by a market economy never have been stronger. Hence, he argues, the political opposition lacks vigor; the labor movement is suffering a “visible moral decline”; the Labor party is rapidly becoming a mere “alternate power-group”; and the traditional idea of a socialist society, featuring economic well-being, now seems totally irrelevant. Here, in short, is a culture which has lost its bearings.
Now many people doubtless share Mr. Williams’s desire for a renewal of revolutionary commitment, a new drive for more democracy in the economy, in politics, and in culture. But everywhere this desire has run into terrible contradictions. Democratization of culture, for example, seems to be at odds with quality—the maintenance of standards. Meanwhile, the mainspring of democratic politics, the urge of people “to make their own decisions,” has come to seem irreconcilable with the demands of the immense technological apparatus for central planning and control. An important factor here, and incidentally one which Mr. Williams scarcely mentions, is the loss of vigor suffered by the British left in the general mobilization of society in the cold war against other, newer revolutionary forces. In any event, the movement toward democratic socialism has bogged down, and the result is a futile churning of stale ideas.
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At this point in the ulterior logic of the book, Mr. Williams offers frustrated socialists a “way out.” Convinced that their doubts and confusions arise from the twisted description of history they carry in their heads, he attempts to replace it with one of his own. So far as he is a historian, Mr. Williams’s purpose is somehow to get back of the paralyzing contradictions faced by progressive thinkers and make possible a renewal of revolutionary, democratic faith. In my view, this is a perfectly legitimate and indeed praiseworthy motive for a historical enterprise. I only wish that the method were as commendable as the intention. But, alas, the method consists largely of abandoning the seemingly outmoded terminology of socialist discourse, with its sharp distinctions between kinds of social organization (feudalism, capitalism, socialism, etc.), and banking everything, instead, on a crude, portmanteau description of the entire modern era as dominated by one, total long revolution.
With these two words he would call to mind all of the complicated changes in our “whole way of life” since the late 18th century. He would have us see the emergence of political democracy, industrial production, and all of the new modes of communication (leading toward a “common culture”) as parts of a single process arising from a single source. The source, so far as one can tell, is an inchoate impulse not unlike the egalitarian urge which Tocqueville discovered at the heart of American institutions in the 1830’s. It is to be found in the determination of the working people to govern themselves, to satisfy their material needs, and to gain equal access to the benefits (if not the responsibilities) of literacy, education, and the mass production of mental commodities. Mr. Williams’s theory of history is holistic. It provides socialists who have lost confidence in what was once thought to be a rational method of political analysis with a new object of trust, namely, those shapeless, massive energies back of the modern revolution. Throughout the book Mr. Williams insists that “we cannot understand the process of change in which we are involved if we limit ourselves to thinking of the democratic, industrial, and cultural revolutions as separate processes.” We must, he says, “keep trying to grasp the process as a whole.”
At first thought there is something wonderfully refreshing about this kind of simplification. Of course it is true that all of these developments interact. Life would be much easier if we could think about them as if they all comprised one change leading in one direction—as if they all had the same consequences. Well, says Mr. Williams, in that event why not try it? Why must we be so doggedly critical of what is inescapable?
A very large part of our intellectual life, to say nothing of our social practice, is . . . devoted to criticizing the long revolution, in this or that aspect, by many powerful selective techniques. But as the revolution itself extends, until nobody can escape it, this whole drift seems increasingly irrelevant. In naming the great process of change the long revolution, I am trying to learn assent to it, an adequate assent of mind and spirit. I find increasingly that the values and meanings I need are all in this process of change.
This touching passage reminds me of The Education of Henry Adams, especially Adams’s discovery of the crushing, deterministic power of modern technology that day “he found himself lying in the Gallery of Machines at the Great Exposition of 1900, his historical neck broken by the irruption of forces totally new.” Adams tells how, standing there among the forty-foot dynamos, he began to think of them as a moral force and how before long he felt an impulse to pray to it. So with Mr. Williams and the force of the “long revolution.” If the usual, critical methods of the intellect will not yield the desired affirmation, he seems to be saying, we must nevertheless find a way to “learn . . . assent of mind and spirit.” Running through The Long Revolution there is a soft, vaguely anti-rational undertone that is particularly disquieting if we take the book as in any sense a gauge of the present climate of opinion in England. At times Mr. Williams seems to be in search of a tidy deterministic explanation. To be sure, there is nothing irrational about accommodating oneself to the inevitable. But playing with loose definitions of the inevitable is one of the more treacherous intellectual pastimes. Besides, how can Mr. Williams say that criticism of the “long revolution” is irrelevant? Irrelevant to what? Perhaps he means futile. After all, criticism of an irreversible trend may always be relevant to one’s own notion of what it means to be human.
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The curious fact of the matter, in any case, is that Mr. Williams shares the almost universal impulse to criticize and resist. This is revealed by his fine novel, Border Country, which was published in England last year but has not yet appeared here. The book is written from the point of view of a young economic historian who teaches in London. At the outset he is called back to Wales, where he grew up, to attend his dying father. A series of flashbacks recreates the father’s life. He has been a railroad worker, an inarticulate, self-contained, proud man who stubbornly has refused every opportunity to get on the status ladder. With the manly dignity of a D. H. Lawrence working-class hero, say Mellors, he creates a life out of his own feelings. Unlike the game-keeper, however, he is sustained by what remains of a genuine community. He derives satisfaction from his friends, his family, his job, his regional loyalties, his gardening, which has complex ritualistic overtones, and above all from his uncompromising defense of the self. Like Lady Chatterly’s Lover or George Orwell’s too little known Coming Up for Air, Border Country joins two great English literary modes: the novel and pastoral. The landscape has a decisive symbolic function in the book, and the father’s virtues are in large measure the conventional virtues of the good shepherd. Watching him die, the protagonist realizes the terrible cost of the “long revolution.” It is weakening, indeed threatening to destroy, all of those bonds with the community which gave him his identity. At the end nothing like an adequate substitute for that community is in view. Border Country is written with only the faintest trace of sentimentality, yet the main flow of feeling in the novel runs counter to the whole movement of history to which Mr. Williams now would have us assent. That is why it is difficult to trust him completely when he asserts that the values and meanings he needs “are all in this process of change,” the “long revolution.”
Yet he would claim a kind of consistency here. The hero of Border Country may be drawn to the old ways, but he has no illusions about going back. (The whole situation is enriched by the fact that one aspect of the local history of industrialization is his special field of research.) He knows that the old community is finished, and that now the only sensible course is to start building a new one. The worst features of the “long revolution” stem from its incompleteness. What makes the novel poignant, finally, is the precise specification—in all its particular sensory associations—of the intellectual’s ambivalence. Enough of this feeling creeps into The Long Revolution, moreover, to make it a more human, less doctrinaire, work than I have been able to indicate. Still, one cannot help feeling that it might have been a truly profound book had Mr. Williams been willing to submit his powerful nostalgia to the discipline of his historical intelligence. When it comes to discipline, however, it is the novelist Williams, not the historian, who is willing to submit.
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How, then, does the author of The Long Revolution assuage the anxiety he so poignantly expresses in Border Country? What enables him to reconcile himself to the destruction of the semi-industrial community? Mr. Williams would have us believe that the main drift of events is leading us (or would be if only we could learn assent) toward a satisfactory “common culture.” By this he has in mind a widely shared body of meaning and value that would sustain a more or less homogeneous community of entertainment, art, and letters. It will be neither high nor low, bourgeois nor mass, but it will satisfy the needs of most people. It is the nearest equivalent, in Mr. Williams’s system, to the ideal socialist state; it is the terminus of the “long revolution.” Having begun with the idea that the psychic root of the “great process of change” is an uncensurable egalitarian impulse, he invests it all with a monolithic benignity.
On reflection, however, the idea of a “common culture” is no more tenable than the idea of the “long revolution” itself. It is an abstraction that transcends but does not resolve contradictions. As Richard Wollheim points out, Mr. Williams simply has failed to take into account the diversity of education, taste, and temperament within an open, complex society. In the idea of a “common culture” readers of Border Country will recognize many features of the village life depicted there. It is apparent that Mr. Williams hopes to recapture, for all England, as many as possible of the values and emotional satisfactions of a small, integrated sub-culture. Thus he envisages a large industrial society dominated by a single “structure of feeling.” This is an illusion. One is reminded of certain followers of Ruth Benedict who, having seen Zuni behavior reduced to a single “pattern of culture,” attempted to do the same for the United States and Britain. But the uncritical application to our problems of anthropological theories derived from the study of tiny, pre-literate cultures can be terribly misleading. What is disturbing about Mr. Williams’s ideal is that one can imagine it being realized only in a totalitarian setting, and even then at a relatively low intellectual level. Of course that is not what he wants. But there is something ominous about a call for a “common culture” in an advanced society today, when it would have to be adapted to the network of standardized communications and a war or consumer’s economy.
In his highly compressed pamphlet, Socialism and Culture, Richard Wollheim defines a more attractive goal. Instead of hankering after cultural unity, which invariably proves to have behind it a nostalgic or reactionary impulse, Wollheim insists on the need for diversity. For him the important aim nowadays is to preserve the cultural rights of minorities no matter how small. Although he fails to make clear the specifically socialist character of the culture he wants, he is persuasive in arguing that our best hope lies in a “plurality of cultures . . . a plural society . . . where various cultures coexist without any special cachet or prestige attaching to one rather than another.”
The distance between these cultural ideals suggests the severity of the intellectual crisis in Britain today. Although both men are “socialists,” they envisage utterly different kinds of cultures. But for that matter, one gets a sense of unbearable strain from the work of Mr. Williams alone. It is there in the contrary pull of Border Country and The Long Revolution. It is there, above all, in the power of the animus he brings to bear on the idea of the private consciousness itself. If he had no regard for it, no understanding of the conditions which nurture it, one might simply dismiss him as an obtuse theoretician. But in The Long Revolution he can write:
It is very difficult . . . to live in a modern industrial society and not feel the force of the “individual and society” distinction. There is a deeply-felt discontinuity, for most of us, between what we as individuals desire to do, and what, by some apparently mysterious process, actually happens “out there” in society. This feeling is perhaps even stronger now than it was when the sharp distinction was first made. Individuals feel radically insecure when their lives are changed by forces which they cannot easily see or name, and as societies have become larger and more complicated, and as the power to change the environment and real relations within it has greatly multiplied, this insecurity has certainly increased. Such insecurity is a constant source of a particular kind of individualism.
It is obvious that Mr. Williams understands how many of us feel about our society a good part of the time. Yet he manages, before he is done, to convince himself that what he has described here is a false emotion based on a false description of reality. He performs the feat, moreover, with almost no outside help. For the truth is that there are virtually no significant works of modern art or literature or philosophy which do not confirm the authenticity of the feeling described. It seems to be the very essence of the modern spirit. His own novel is suffused by a similar mood of anxious powerlessness. Nevertheless, Mr. Williams insists that our only hope is to override the cringing self, and somehow reaffirm our allegiance to that mysterious process going on out there which he calls the “long revolution.” He would have us believe that this can be done without any sacrifice of intelligence.
Today most intellectuals in this country will be skeptical. For one thing, we are all on guard against the dangers of the historicist fallacy. Mr. Williams’s commitment to the “long revolution” approaches a faith in an abstraction as treacherous as history itself. On the other hand, most of us appreciate the need he feels to move beyond the sterile ideal of the separate person. Why, then, do we assume that assent to the “long revolution” necessarily involves a sacrifice of intelligence? This is the most disturbing question that Mr. Williams asks. His answer is emphatic. He says that in our culture intelligence has been defined as the activity of the solitary mind confronting the world. And he would add, to give him the last word, that we had best redefine it—and soon.
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1 The Long Revolution, by Raymond Williams (Columbia University Press, 370 pp., $5.00).
2 Socialism and Culture, by Richard Wollheim (The Fabian Society, 48 pp., 4/6).
3 As I write, there are signs that the Labor party, assembled for its annual conference at Blackpool, may be coming back to life.
