The Long Revolution

Raymond Williams “The Long Revolution” (1961) is a sequel to “Culture and Society” and one of the key texts of early Cultural Studies. Williams describes the process of modernisation as a fundamental but long revolutionary process with several interrelation subsystems: the Democratic Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and the Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution consists of the extension of communication.“The Long Revolution” is a sample of system thinking or dialectics as it develops the “over-determination” between the economic base and the political and cultural superstructure without oversimplifying it.Williams’ key concept is the “structure of feeling” which is similar to Foucault’s “discourse” structure. He shows how aristocratic, bourgeois and working class “social characters” coexist in the 1840s.Different chapters deal with the history of the British education system, the reading audience, the popular press, and “Standard English”. These explorations show a materialist and dialectic alternative to traditional literary history. “The Long Revolution” however is an early document of Cultural Studies and still has quite a restricted and literature-centric notion of “culture”. I miss a chapter on Secularization and a broader analysis of material culture beyond books and newspapers.The last chapter tries a political analysis of Britain in 1960. This chapter is a document of the 1960 Social-democratic illusions about the welfare state. Williams believes the conflict between capitalism and socialism has ebbed away in an organized capitalism. He was wrong.Williams’ political message corresponds with the rhetoric of the anti-nuclear war movement in the late 50s and early 60s, which used “humanist” arguments to overcome Cold War thinking. “The Long Revolution” depicts a process of historical progress to democracy, industry, and culture. British history appears very harmonious and there is not much said about Colonialism, the Irish and the violent primitive accumulation of capital. Williams omits the concept of capitalist relations of production and class struggle.

Raymond Williams, big in the 60s and 70s, is perhaps slightly out of fashion now, cited as "the father of British Cultural Studies" or the like, but not read in depth. This is understandable, as he has serious blind spots: empire, gender and sexuality, even family life in general. In fact, the only things he's really good on are class relations and the ideological pressures that come to bear on individuals in a capitalist society. The last is ironic, as he often writes against the individualism of modernist art, like in the "Individual and Society" chapter in Long Revolution. He has socialist, even communist, sympathies, made explicit in the later Marxism and Literature, but the sense of the thwarted individual against the machine often comes peeping out, especially in readings like that of Jane Eyre in his book on The English Novel. It is that sense of an individual struggling through problems and seeking both individual fulfilment and community that I find most compelling in Williams' books, and that differentiates him from a lot of academic writers of these days of theory, postmodernism, death of the humanist subject and the like. Williams is a mixture of the 19th-century man of letters and the late 20th/ early 21st-century literary theorist obsessed with power relations and hegemony and so forth.This book is from the early 60s, so before his advent of theory, but Williams is a born generalist and interdiscplinarian, and in LR he talks about canonical philosophers in one chapter, and 60s pop culture in the next. His ambitions are very broad: to diagnose society's ills a la Carlyle and the like (the tradition he wrote about in the earlier Culture and Society) and point the way towards a more inclusive community. In terms of actual solutions he's pretty vague, not yet in his fully Marxist phase, but obviously sceptical of capitalism.His methodology for studying popular culture is a bit haphazard, and by today's standards outdated, but quite novel at the time (I believe; I wasn't around then) - for example, in his chapter on the social background of English writers he consults the National Encyclopedia of Biography and lists the numbers of working class v. number of aristoctats for each era. His chapter on "The Analysis of Culture" is probably the most important in the book, often excerpted in Cultural Theory readers. He gives the varying historical meanings of the term culture, eventually giving the definition that culture is "the study of relationships between elements in a whole way of life". This opens things up nicely for a study of everything, and from this much contemporary pop culture studies comes; as it happens, Williams was usually at his best studying canonical literature, not seeming to have a great deal of sympathy with pop culture except in theory ("Culture is ordinary", he famously wrote).Reading Williams now you get an insight into the intellectual life of his day, quite different from these postmodern times in which we have the privilege to reside, and you get the impression of a sensitive mind honestly grappling with the problems of existence, individual and social. In this, I would almost tend to read this book as a piece of literature, not so much as a work of social theory ("theory" being an overrated concept when it comes to understanding the human, in any case). I sense a certain class element in my own attraction to his work, flawed though the work is. He was from a rural working-class (Welsh) background, and he retained a respect for those values - though I think he was in tension with them, too, more than he liked to admit. By the time he wrote this, he was a Cambridge don. I'm from a similarish background and also now in academia, and so can't fail to find it somewhat powerful to read of a thoughtful, humane mind that went through the same journey and felt himself compelled to devote himself to analysis of the whole social process of which he was a part.

A heavy read but worth it

Excellent book, the condition was exactly how it was described, and it arrived within a couple of days