Alasdair MacIntyre

Culture and Revolution

(Summer 1961)
From International Socialism (1st series), No.5, Summer 1961, p.28.
Thanks to Ted Crawford & the late Will Fancy.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line
(ETOL).

The Long Revolution

Raymond Williams
Chatto and Windus, 1961, 30s.
Culture and Society 1780-1950
Raymond Williams
Penguin Books, 1961, 4s.6d.
Hegel said that the function of philosophy was to make man at home in the
world. The effect of a good deal of socialist theorizing is almost the opposite. The
categories of thought are often so alien to the detail of everyday experience that theory
becomes not a kind of insight, but a kind of blindness, and a blindness almost
deliberate and willed. On the one hand there is the fabric of life at work and in the
family, the worries about children and schooling, the pub and the Trade Union branch,
housing and money and holidays. On the other hand there is some imposed abstract
political scheme, a mechanical rendering of Marxs view of history or, worse still, of
Lenin or the Fabians. These, coexisting in a single mind, produce in turn theoretical
sterility and frustration, a violent refusal to face the complexity of thought and
temporary relief in the substitution of easy slogans and formulas for well-founded
conclusions.
Raymond Williams has done more than any other writer to liberate us from this.
His novel, Border Country, makes it plain why he was so well equipped for the task.
For those who have traversed in their own lives the journey between working-class
and university life, or between Wales and England, the felt experience is a movement
towards and not away from theorizing. To travel in class and in place is also to travel
in time through the social strata laid down at different periods in the past hundred
years. One can be forced to ask for a view of history because one discovers that one is
oneself what the past has made one. All of Raymond Williams work is touched with
an entirely admirable and unobtrusive self-consciousness of this kind.

This personal quality is linked to a method of approach which in one respect at

least promises well. Williams approaches social change through thought about social
change. In Culture and Society he discusses the variety of descriptions which people
have offered in theories, in novels, in polemical tracts and literary criticism, of social
changes since the industrial revolution. This, as The Long Revolution makes clear, is
not a substitute for describing such change itself. But the changes did not happen, did
not exist, except as an incarnation of human purposes and projects, and we do not
know what men were doing who contrived these changes unless we know how they
envisaged them. The cultural images which men throw up are a first attempt at a
history of human action in their time; but even before that they themselves are also
part, and the articulate, conscious part, of the change which such history aspires to
describe. We cannot describe a period first in our terms and then ask how good
contemporaries were at describing it; for we do not know what they were doing unless
we know how they described it. It is in the incoherences of such descriptions that we
discover the key to the difference between the true story and the story as told. So Marx
began not by going straight to capitalism and measuring up his own description of
capitalism against that of classical political economy. He began with the classical
economists, whom he treated as the voice of capitalist society, and only later pierced
through the veil of half-understanding with which capitalism protects itself.
The danger of such an approach is that by accepting the terms in which a
culture makes itself articulate we become imprisoned within those terms and unable to
transcend them. This danger is particularly acute when the culture we study is that of
our own age or the recent past. For then we cannot get outside ourselves unless
we already possess a theoretical background of the kind which Marxism aspires to
provide. I do not mean of course that Marxism enables us to leave our skins; but it
suggests that we can find a standpoint to judge what we are by what we can be.
Marxism brings contemporary possibility on to the stage in order to pass judgment
upon contemporary actuality.
Although Williams is not a Marxist, he escapes imprisonment by the present
in Culture and Society because he brings together such a host of conflicting
witnesses that no one conceptual scheme dominates us. Cobbett, Mill, Disraeli,
Gissing, Lawrence, Tawney and many others all contribute to a growing, if
contradictory, consciousness of the possibility of a common culture. But in The Long
Revolution where the question is asked how far that possibility has in fact been
realised the situation is much worse. Put briefly, Williams accepts as authentic the
unity of our society and his long revolution is a revolution against nothing except the
inertia of the past. The false consciousness of gradualism is allowed to be judged in its
own terms.
This comes out clearly in Williams essay on the individual and society, where
the beginnings of a good discussion never come to fruition because Williams does not
allow for the fact that particular framings of the antithesis always took place in a
context of specific institutions. To place what Williams says about Freud in the
context of the situation of the intelligentsia in the decline of the Austro-Hungarian

Empire or Williams metaphors of vagrancy and exile in relation to actual vagrancy

and actual exiles would be to transform his discussion. The result of Williams
abstraction is a loss of tension. We escape the fact that every individual exists at a
point where life is a conflict between his unrealised potentialities and the barriers
which confront their realisation. We are defined both by what we can be and by what
we have to struggle against. Every form of class society up to our own has been at
once a release of and an inhibition of human possibility. In our society. class is wholly
inhibiting. Or so at least the Marxist argues. Williams never confronts this thesis.
Instead of the splendid, tentative discussion of Marxism and literature in Culture and
Society we get in The Long Revolution a presentation of Marxism as the ghost of a
theory in which most of human life is omitted.
What Williams himself omits is three-fold: work, class, power. This is not to
say that in occasional paragraphs their importance is not recognized. But these lonely
banners of traditional socialism are never integrated into the book. Instead of classconsciousness we get as the subject of this book far too often an unidentified we.
Instead of work and its organization we get the concept of the market. Instead of
power we get public opinion. And the whole argument is weakened by its insularity.
Capitalism never appears on the scene properly because no world movement appears
there as such. British development is treated as though autonomous.
There have been since the industrial revolution in Britain two main critiques of
our form of life. One was the romantic protest against capitalist ugliness whose
culmination is in Lawrence and Leavis. The other was the socialist protest. William
Morris held them together in his own day: it is a prime victory of bourgeois ideology
to have kept them apart ever since. Raymond Williams has done more than anyone
else to bring them together again. But so far at the key points in his writings the
argument always breaks down. I have not begun to do justice to the richness of the
books; but it is clear from The Long Revolution that unless Williams can learn from
Marx what Morris learnt he will continue to disappoint as well as to teach.