Raymond Williams

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Raymond Williams

Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, E.P. Thompson, and Stuart Hall initiated the intellectual movement in the U.K. that became known around the world as Cultural Studies. These thinkers critiqued industrial capitalism, identifying the impact that the Industrial Revolution had on the social and the natural order, especially during the period immediately after the Second World War. They championed working-class culture, the existence of which was being threatened by American popular culture.

Williams (1921-88) grew up in the Welsh village of Pandy, Abergavenny, the son of a railway signalman. He attended the local grammar school. He became a socialist in his teens, reading the Communist Manifesto (1848) with great interest. He won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, feeling an outsider because of his background. For a few years, he was a member of the Communist Party, but left rejecting Stalinism in politics and culture. Williams was put off by Stalin's cruel treatment of the peasants, not to mention his cultural policy, including social realism. During the Second World War, Williams served as a captain in an anti-Tank armoured division, taking part in the D-Day invasion of Europe. After the war, he taught (1946-60) in adult education programs at Oxford University, publishing Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961), which established his reputation as a major communications/cultural studies critic and theorist. In due course, Williams distanced himself from Marxism: he replaced the Marxist concept of "mode of production" with "mode of information" as the dynamic core of society, and he redefined revolution as a long process of cultural change rather than a class struggle for political p...

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...d money will drive out good (Gresham's Law), so bad culture will drive out good. Our response to this analogy will have to be historical. True, we have much more bad culture (it is easier to distribute and we have more leisure to enjoy it), but we also have much more good culture. In fact, we live in an expanding culture, and all the elements in this culture are themselves expanding. If we start from this, we can ask real questions about the political and the economic problems raised by conditions (pp. 13-14).

WORKS CITED

Arnold, Matthew. 1869. Culture and Anarchy. London: Macmillan and Co.

Williams, Raymond. 1958a. "Resources of Hope." In N. McKenzie (Ed.), Convictions. London: MacGibbon and Kee, pp. 24-34.

---. 1958b. "Culture is Ordinary." In Ann Gray and Jim McGuigan (Eds.), Studies in Culture: An Introductory Reader. London: Arnold, 1997, pp. 5-14.

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