Page 38 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

F.R.LEAVIS

weaponry. Deindustrialization may very well be occurring, and in
ways which may very well foreshadow the development of a properly
post-industrial society. But any such society will be of necessity post-
capitalist, rather than pre-capitalist, in form. That it might bear any
resemblance at all to medieval feudalism seems, to say the least, highly
improbable. Stripped of its peculiar Christian medievalism, and rendered
compatible, if not with secularism, then at least with Nonconformist
Protestantism, Eliot’s social theory might easily have proved much
less pessimistic in its general import. It is precisely such a transformation
in the culturalist paradigm, requiring a partial rehabilitation, at least,
of Arnold’s earlier reformism, that we find in the work of Dr Leavis
of Cambridge.

F.R.Leavis

Leavis was perhaps the best known of all Eliot’s academic champions
during the interwar period. The journal Scrutiny, and the group around
it—Leavis himself, his wife Q.D.Leavis, Denys Thompson, L.C.
Knights—forged an elaborate literary-critical doctrine, in many respects
indebted to Eliot, but much less specifically Christian, and quite
definitely more Protestant than Catholic, which would eventually
provide the central rationale for the profession of English teaching.
For the moment, however, let us confine our attentions to the
immediately theoretical content of the Leavisite programme. Leavis
and the Leavisites inherited from Eliot a number of their characteristic
themes, especially a clearly organicist conception of culture, and a
correspondingly pessimistic understanding of recent historical process
as cultural decline. But, during the 1930s, “the Marxizing decade”, 24
as Leavis recalled it, these became synthesized with a developing critique
of communist Marxism, then enjoying an unusual, and entirely
temporary, influence over Anglophone literary-critical circles.
In some important respects, Leavis’s “practical criticism” played a
similar rôle, in emphasizing the importance of the text as against the
remorseless contextualism of much Marxist criticism, to that of the
New Criticism of John Crowe Ransom in the United States. But Leavis
shared little of Ransom’s hostility to historical explanation per se.
And precisely because he did share in Eliot’s fundamentally holistic,
semi-Hegelian notion of culture, and perhaps, too, because he

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