Culture and Society, 1780-1950

A gold-mine for quotes from authors you should have read but never will (Gissing, Carlyle, Ruskin etc etc...), Williams sums up the argument of this book in two paragraphs of his conclusion: the Romantics started talking about 'Culture' because they were looking for a way to discuss the changes of

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industrialism. The late romantics and fin de siecle types became either total idealists with an anti-democratic concept of culture, or socialists with a hyper-democratic concept of it; both of these attitudes lead to paradox. Modernists continue these trends, but have to deal not only with industrialism, but also with mass media, actually existing democracy and 'actually existing' socialism. Everyone keeps trying to provide a foundation for the support of/ attack on 'culture,' and nobody has yet succeeded. End.
But along the way there are all sorts of little gems which make it well worth reading, and he's very even-keeled. He can analyze Orwell, Anglo-Marxism and Coleridge with equal sympathy and skill.
Williams' prose is a great lesson in how to write - inasmuch as it's clear and coherent - and how not to write - inasmuch as his best points are buried in the middle of paragraphs analyzing long quotes from dead authors.
Finally, this is a book about the English tradition. You may notice that when you pick up the book and see that all the chapters are about English men. Of course, if you judge books by their titles, you'll be misled. But that's your fault. If you're looking for a post-colonialist analysis of British imperio-hegemony or whatever, find something else. Don't blame this book for not being what it never intended to be, anymore than you'd blame a book about the Punjabi political situation in the 1950's for not analyzing Mill's book on Bentham and Coleridge.

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