Page 81 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

70 Chapter Two

Culture and Society
Cultural and Society traces changes in the meaning of culture over a period
of one hundred and seventy years, as gleaned from the writings of a succes-
sion of British authors including Burke, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, J. S. Mill,
Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, William Morris, Tawney, D. H. Lawrence, and
T. S. Eliot. Williams’ objective was to develop “a new general theory of cul-
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ture” by interrelating all of culture’s major elements —industry, democracy,
class, and art—to show that as these changed, so did the meaning of culture. 53
Political-economic concerns, then, are built into the very core of Williams’
theory of culture. Indeed, he declared, “the development of the word culture
is a record of a number of important and continuing reactions to these
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changes in our social, economic, and political life;” and again: “Our mean-
ing of culture is a response to the events which our meanings of industry and
democracy most evidently define.” 55
For Williams, culture was “a special kind of map by means of which the na-
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ture of the changes can be explored.” For example, when traditionalists equate
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culture with elitist (“high”) culture, they are being antidemocratic, for the im-
plication is that working people are inferior and hence incapable of participating
wisely in political affairs. This class bias, according to Williams, infuses the
schools, which he thought normally reinforce existing social relations. A virtue
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of T. S. Eliot’s famous but otherwise conservative essay, Notes Towards the De-
finition of Culture (1948), according to Williams, is its treatment of culture as “a
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whole way of life.” Eliot pronounced that “culture includes all the characteris-
tic activities and interests of a people: Derby Day, Henley Regatta, the twelfth of
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August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale
cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, nineteenth century
Gothic churches, and the music of Elgar.” 61
This notion of culture as a whole way of life, which Williams appropriated,
did not originate with Eliot, however. Williams understood that it had already
become commonplace within anthropology and sociology, and that it may
even be traced to such literary theorists as Coleridge (1772–1834) and Car-
lyle (1795–1881). Nonetheless, as compared to those literary conservatives, 62
Williams’ innovation was to apply this broad conception of culture as an an-
tidote to elitist schools of thought. It is true, Williams affirmed, that due to its
historically subservient position, the working class had not (yet) contributed
substantially to culture in the restricted sense of a body of imaginative and in-
tellectual “works.” But then, for him, “a culture can never be reduced to its
artifacts while it is being lived.” What the working class had accomplished,
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however, and magnificently so, was the creation of institutions based on a
collectivist view of society: trade unions, the cooperative movement, a polit-