Why his seminal work Culture and Society is still relevant almost 60 years on.

What is culture? What does it do? Why does it matter? These are the questions taken up by critic, novelist and academic Mr Raymond Williams in his hugely influential book Culture and Society, a landmark work that almost single-handedly invented the field of cultural studies when it was first published in 1958.

What was so remarkable about Mr Williams’ approach was that it challenged many of the assumptions that were, at the time, widely held about culture and the words that, since the 19th century, we have created to describe it. Reading the book today, in the newly reissued paperback edition from Vintage Classics, it’s still illuminating, and a little surprising, to be reminded that such words are relatively new. To take one example, before the Industrial Revolution we had no concept of industry as a wider entity, a force that shaped society. Now the word can be applied to almost anything. And what about art? In the 18th century, the word was used to describe not so much a creative discipline with its own rules and standards – “but is it art?” – as a skill or utility, closer to artisanship. Class was something you attended at school, not a measure of social status. Common meant shared, not vulgar. We didn’t always call things highbrow or pretentious. How did we survive?

As the title of the book suggests, culture is chief among the new words that emerged at the end of the 19th century, and came to define art and literature in the years beyond. It has also always been, clearly, a slippery concept. For Mr Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his fellow Romantics, culture meant art as an antidote to industrialism, the refined whisperings of an alternative, more perfect sphere of existence that could be accessed only by the creative genius. For Mr DH Lawrence, it was a matter of conditioning the self and the mind, a way of avoiding ugly thoughts in an ugly world. For Mr TS Eliot, culture was a whole way of life, encapsulated in the everyday as well as the highbrow, otherwise it was meaningless. Meanwhile, for Mr Karl Marx (whom Mr Williams focuses on in depth), culture was more a byproduct of society, not the means by which it advanced.

This is all well and good, but is any of it still relevant? Remarkably, yes. Though more than half a century old, Mr Williams’ book covers a period in which British society underwent inconceivable changes, not just in terms of working habits and methods, but in media consumption. The study of culture in this context, therefore, is not just academic sophistry but, as Mr Williams puts it, “a record of our reactions, in thought and feeling, to the changed conditions of our common life”.

What, then, to make of such ideas at a moment when, as in the 19th century, we are going through a comparable process of change, both in the way we work (with the spectre of automation and AI looming on the horizon – potentially another sort of Industrial Revolution) and in the way we consume culture, via digital media? If Mr Williams was concerned about “good” culture cutting through the mass of “horror comics” and “strip newspapers” that abounded in the 1950s, what would he make of Facebook, BuzzFeed, fake news and trolling YouTube commenters? At many points, Mr Williams’ concluding proposition of a “common culture” – that is, a bank of knowledge, skills and resources to which everyone has equal access – sounds a lot like the internet.

Beyond any such weirdly prophetic coincidences, the book is still one that bristles with ideas about how we might live and interact with each other, how we might live in the world as well as write about and document it. Many of these have, of course, been superseded, but others are still worth chewing over. Early 20th-century socialist Mr RH Tawney’s equivocation on equality, for example. Does this idea mean that every person is born equal, or that every person is born different but deserves the same opportunities? Or even some of the now counter-intuitive views on democracy from Mr Edmund Burke – what separates a popular vote from mob rule? What, in any case, asks Mr Williams, do we mean by the words mob and masses? How are they different? Given that, since Mr Williams’ time, our lives have become even more saturated with words, opinions, lazy abstractions and heated opinions, it’s always helpful to connect with a mind that was so scrupulous about the meanings of the words we use. You can’t help thinking, in our age of information overload, we could do with a little more of such precision.

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