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Contemporary Cultural Theory

fateful question’ as to whether a truly ‘generous’ idea of culture
is possible remains only ‘precariously’ open (Williams, 1963,
pp. 322–3; Hartman, 1997, pp. 192–3).
For Hartman, the most crucial of the various distinctions in
the term’s meaning is that between ‘culture’ as a general ideal,
‘a “republic of letters” in which ideas can be freely exchanged’,
and ‘a culture’ as ‘a specific form of embodiment or solidarity’;
he believes there is a crucial need to protect the former against
the latter (Hartman, 1997, pp. 36, 41). For Williams, the most
crucial distinction was that between the term’s use in the human-
ities and in the social sciences. The concept of ‘culture’, he
explained:

became a noun of ‘inner’ process, specialized to its presumed
agencies in ‘intellectual life’ and ‘the arts’. It became also a
noun of general process, specialized to its presumed
configurations in ‘whole ways of life’. It played a crucial role
in definitions of ‘the arts’ and ‘the humanities’, from the first
sense. It played an equally crucial role in definitions of the
‘human sciences’ and the ‘social sciences’, in the second sense
(Williams, 1977, p. 17).

Culture, then, may be counterposed to society, as ‘art’; but the two
words may also be defined nearly coextensively, as everything
that is left over after politics and economics. There is a clear
parallel between Hartman and Williams here, since ‘culture’ is
to ‘a culture’ as ‘arts’ is to ‘a whole way of life’. But where for
Hartman the key distinction runs between a generality and a
particular, a general public sphere and a singular subculture, for
Williams it ran between two generalities, the arts and the whole
way of life. Note the wider significance of this: while for Williams
society still remained a generality, or a commonality, for Hartman
it has already become a multicultural plurality of particulars. We
shall return to the competing claims of what Williams termed the
‘common culture’ and politico-social multiculturalism in the
chapters that follow. For the moment, however, suffice it to note
that this is an issue of quite fundamental significance, not simply
for academic cultural studies, but also for the future of our society
and our culture.

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